tinkering with my website

Thankfully things have quietened down a little recently, and I have been distractedly tinkering with my website.

Running a website is one of those things that seems to be entirely resistant to methodical project planning. Rather than setting out with a clear objective, it seems to be a process of tinkering, fixing the problems you created, finding new things you want to do, getting fed up with the time it is taking, leaving it alone, coming back to it with a better idea. Probably an iterative process in the jargon.

Specifically I have returned to trying to put a search function onto my website, I had tried before with the Google Search option that you could insert using code that Google supplied. However this never seemed to pick up on material deeper within my site, so I ended up removing it.

Lately a new RapidWeaver plugin has appeared. [RapidWeaver is the Macintosh application that I use for coding the website, but it is supported with a rich ecosystem of plugins and themes.] So I have tried RapidSearch, it seemed to encounter similar problems, the developer advises that no one else has reported anything similar, so I am wondering if it might be how the pages are nested within each other that is offending the Google sitecrawlers somehow.

Anyway, I have installed a sitemap, courtesy of Sitemap by Loghound, and tried to simplify my website so that there is less nesting of folders, page elements, and the main blog page is now the home page, rather than deeper within the structure.

I will just have to put the whole issue to one side for a while and wait and see if once the Google sitecrawlers have passed over the site again it is all tickety boo.

I have also been doing a little additional tinkering. Yesterday I put in a favicon. No I didn't know what it was either, it is the wee icon in the address bar that some sites have.

I really will need to get the RapidWeaver manual and read through it properly, my site is getting to be complicated enough that it is probably worth me having a rough idea what I am actually doing.

I might even get round to enabling comments on my blog!

All in all it is just a gradual process of getting the hang of a certain level of complexity, tinkering away around the limits of my capability, and thereby gradually expanding them. There is probably a lot else in life that is much the same.