The Wongery

It's kind of funny looking back now on the old posts where I boast about, for instance, having spent at least an hour working on the Wongery every day for a week, because now... yeah, I'm spending at least that long working on it pretty much every day. I've been spending a lot of time working on the Wongery lately. Which is good, and it is a high priority of mine, and something I do want to spend time on; it's just kind of depressing that I have so little to show for it.

(Also, there are maybe some other things I should spend more time working on because they have perhaps a somewhat better prospect of actually making me some money, which would be... nice. But, well, so much to do, so little time...)

I swear I'm working on some new articles! Really!

But a lot of what I've been doing lately has once again been, well, more behind-the-scenes stuff. Like I mentioned a few posts ago, I made some refinements to the coding for the blog page. I've finally, finally started seriously working on implementing what I need to start adding game-stat content to the RPG space, starting with installing the Scribunto extension that allows the embedding of Lua scripts (which turned out to be extremely easy and something I really should have done a long time ago (the next steps, however, will be rather more involved)). I've been... well, writing blog posts, like this one, which also can take considerable time that maybe would have been better spent on actual articles?

There are new articles coming! I swear!

But anyway, yesterday I did... something else I maybe should have done a long time ago. As I've said several times, I'm... not great with computers. I somehow managed to stumble my way through writing some custom extensions for MediaWiki and phpBB, but I have no professional programming experience and don't really know what I'm doing. But as incompetent as I am as a programmer, there are other aspects of computer use I know even less about. Like system administration. And SEO.

I mean, I'd heard the term SEO, and I know enough about it to know what it stands for without looking it up. It's Search Engine Optimization, and it has to do with, well, taking measures that will help one's site get highly ranked on search engines. I just don't know anything about doing it, especially since I'm pretty sure it's changed over the years since I first heard of it and some of the advice that was given out then about good SEO practices no longer applies. Like... HTML metadata? I know that used to be a huge part of SEO, but I guess it isn't anymore? Or is it? I don't know.

So, yeah, I haven't really done much to... whatever the verb form of "SEO" is... the Wongery. (Search-engine-optimize?) And I'm not going to start putting a lot of time into SEO now, because, again, I don't know how to do that, and while it's possible I could learn more about SEO, I think there are much better—and less tedious—uses to which I could put my time. Still, while I'm not going to take extraordinary measures to, uh optimize the Wongery's engine searchability, or however you phrase that (O its ES, you could but absolutely should not say), one simple thing I could do is at least make sure the Wongery is being indexed and appears on major search engines. Both Google and Bing include means for website owners to submit their sites to be crawled and indexed, and I, uh, hadn't done that.

So, anyway, I have now. (As for other search engines, apparently DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, and Yahoo all use data from Bing (the first along with other sources), and none has a way for sites to be submitted to them directly, and, uh, I know there are also other search engines, including I guess some that are very popular in certain countries, like Baidu and Naver and Yandex, but I don't think they really need to be a high priority for me right now.)^[1] It turned out to be a fairly simple process, although perhaps not as effective as it could have been, because the Wongery doesn't have a sitemap, which I guess is something maybe it should have? This is something that until yesterday I did not realize was a thing.

So I guess at some point I should make a sitemap for the Wongery? Or sitemaps, because apparently a site can have more than one. I guess there's a MediaWiki maintenance script that can generate sitemaps for a wiki automatically—though I'd still presumably have to run it separately for the Central Wongery, the Public Wongery, and the Metawongery, plus any Master Wongeries when and if those become a thing—but I guess I should also maybe have a sitemap for the blog, which I guess it shouldn't be that hard to write code to generate automatically. Should there be a sitemap for the forum? Eh... I don't know, but not a priority right now, anyway.

So, yeah. There's another thing on my increasingly long (yet still unwisely unwritten) to-do list. But by no means the most urgent item on my to-do list. I really ought to finish setting things up so I can finally start filling the RPG space with content.

And articles. New articles. There are new articles coming. I swear there are new articles coming.