Posts tagged with "SEO"

BlogMore v2.39.0

1 min read; 13 GFI
Coding

BlogMore v2.39.0 has a couple of changes, one more or less cosmetic, the other a new feature that I probably should have added right near the start of the project.

First, the cosmetic: in pages and posts, when you use headings (#, ##, etc.), a is added to the end of each heading, along with some show-on-mouse-hover styling, to make it easy to grab the anchor of a particular section of a page1. A problem I'd noticed with this recently is that the shows up in the search text, and also in the content of all the feeds. While not a problem as such, it felt untidy.

So, with this release that particular character is stripped from the search index and from the feeds.

The second change is a facility that should be useful if you have legacy URLs that you really must have land on an actual page or post: redirection support.

This facility is provided by a new redirect_from frontmatter property. From now on, a page or a post can declare which URLs should be redirected to it. So, if you have a post that, given your current post location setup, would land at /2006/06/06/hello-world/, but in some other incarnation of your blog lived at /posts/2006-06-06-hello-world.html, you can now set this in the frontmatter:

redirect_from: /posts/2006-06-06-hello-world.html

and the old URL will be redirected to the new one. This is achieved by simply creating a very minimal HTML file at the old location, which contains a redirection. The content of the file will end up looking something like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>Redirecting...</title>
    <link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/2006/06/06/hello-world/">
    <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=/2006/06/06/hello-world/">
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>Redirecting to <a href="/2006/06/06/hello-world/">/2006/06/06/hello-world/</a>...</p>
  </body>
</html>

If a blog has migrated between locations and/or generation tools over the years, and there are a number of different legacy URLs out there still pointing to a post you really want to keep readable to all, you can also redirect from multiple URLs:

redirect_from:
  - /posts/2006-06-06-hello-world.html
  - /posts/2006/06/06/hello-world.html
  - /my/really/old/blog/structure/hello-world-06-06-06.html

While all of this would have been possible anyway, by creating the appropriate file, with the appropriate content, in the extras directory, this approach helps automate the process and also means that the redirection information lives with the page or post being redirected to.

  1. The recently-added floating ToC is another way to do this now too. ↩

atomBlogMoreCodingPyPIPythonRSSSEO

BlogMore v2.28.0

1 min read; 8 GFI
Coding

I've just released BlogMore v2.28.0. This release has some small improvements to the JSON-LD structured data that was added in the last release, and also adds support for actually showing author names on posts.

On the latter point first: I only ever really created BlogMore for myself, thinking that perhaps some other folk might use it at some point. All along, though, I had it in mind that it would only ever be used to create a site where there was a single author. Despite this, though, I'd added support for setting the author per-post, and this was reflected in the RSS and Atom feeds.

But I'd never added support for showing the author in posts.

So this release adds that feature. I've tried to add full control, with settings that let you turn on/off showing the author blog-wide, as well as providing control per-post. Also, as well as setting the default author for a blog, and being able to set the author for a specific post, you can do the same for an author's URL (setting it blog-wide and per post).

Obviously, when the author is shown, if a URL can be worked out (the one local to the post is chosen first, then the blog-wide default if one isn't set for the post), the author's name links to their URL.

The JSON-LD changes are a couple of small improvements to the content. The author data adds a url property (following the same rules mentioned above) and the image property for a post will fall back to the site logo (if one is set) when there is no cover.

BlogMoreCodingHTMLJSON-LDmicroformatsPyPIPythonSEOweb

BlogMore v2.27.0

1 min read; 13 GFI
Coding

Much like the last two releases of BlogMore, this is another that has ended up being on the theme of improving or adorning the generated HTML.

One change in the last release resulted in another HTML validator warning, and so that's cleaned up here (the removal of the h2 elements from the sidebar meant it no longer made sense for it to be a section, so I've turned it into a div).

On top of that, I've also decided to dip my toe into adding more "microformat" type things to the generated code. This release adds things like JSON-LD structured data and Microformats2 semantic markup, where appropriate. I've also updated all of the "socials" links that appear in the sidebar to ensure they're marked up as rel="me".

Given that this is a bit of an experiment, expect to see some tweaks and changes as I roll this out on this blog and then check and test the result. This is a useful learning exercise for me.

BlogMoreCodingHTMLJSON-LDmicroformatsPyPIPythonSEOweb