Random posts

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I’ve been slowly migrating my notes from Obsidian to Tana, and part of that involves essentially visiting every blog post on here again (inside of my notes) to get things properly tagged. It’ll be wildly useful when I’m done, but it’s rather tedious right now.

However, I’m getting a lot of value out of seeing those old posts again. There are a handful of old posts that I reference fairly often, but most posts are published and forgotten. This process has brought them back to light, and it’s been great.

I wanted to find a system kind of like Readwise that would take all of my posts and show me a random one every time I asked. As far as I can tell that system doesn’t exist, but please correct me if I’m wrong.

Instead, I had ChatGPT write me a simple WordPress plugin that does the trick, and it’s great! You can check it out here if you’re curious; every time you refresh the page, it shows another random post from my archive.

If I’m logged into the site, I also get a button on the screen that allows me to exclude that particular post from coming up again. There are a lot of posts on the site that are worth keeping on here but aren’t as valuable for me to revisit (like “new” WordPress features from years ago, or the various “Sunday Summary” posts). I’ll see them once, and then it’ll hide them going forward. The button just looks like this:

ChatGPT to write code

The experience of having ChatGPT write this code was mind-blowing. Here are the things I asked along the way in order to get what I wanted. Not only did it do a great job, but you can see my plans evolve as it came together:

  • Write code for a wordpress plugin that shows the full content of a random post each time the page is refreshed
  • This is good, but I only want the random post to show on a specific page, not on the main pages.
  • Excellent. Now I’d like to have it display the original post date on that page as well
  • Now include a button on the page that I can press that will exclude this specific post from appearing again in future random refreshes
  • When i click the “exclude this post from future”, have it load another random post once it’s done adding it to the exclusion list. Also, add a second button next to that one that simply refreshes the page to show a different random post.
  • When I click the “show another random post” button, the screen just turns white
  • It’s still showing a white page after I click that button (this time it solved the issue)
  • (for me, out of curiosity): Where are these exclusions stored in the wordpress database?
  • Only show the two buttons if a user is logged into the site

It was crazy to spend 10 minutes chatting with ChatGPT and getting a relatively complex plugin created. The refresh stuff I probably could have figured out on my own, but the “include a button on the page that I can press that will exclude this specific post from appearing again in future random refreshes” is way beyond my coding skillset these days.

This taught me a bit more about the power of ChatGPT, but it also gave me a page to visit from time to time to refresh my memories on those old posts. Win win!

The WordPress drama shows why WordPress remains the best choice

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Over the last few months, the WordPress community has been a bit of a mess. The short version of the “mess” is that Matt Mullenweg (the man behind WordPress) is not happy with WP Engine (a major host of WordPress sites) and it’s causing a lot of fallout. My friend Aaron has a great timeline of events if you want to dig in a bit deeper.

While it’s all very unfortunate and it’s hurting the WordPress ecosystem quite a lot, it also shows why WordPress remains the best platform for most websites.

Because WordPress is self-hosted (you can download it and run it wherever you want), there is only so much that Matt (or anyone else) can do to break things. He’s causing a mess, and many of our clients are hosted on WP Engine, but the direct impacts have been minimal because with WordPress you fully own your site.

Matt isn’t happy with WP Engine, but he can’t do much about it. We have a lot of clients hosted on WP Engine, and their sites are fine.

Why not Squarespace?

This is the main difference between WordPress and other platforms like Squarespace or Shopify. If Anthony Casalena (CEO of Squarespace) or Tobias Lütke (CEO of Shopify) had a similar beef, they could literally just shut websites down if they wanted to. They both seem like solid leaders, but many thought the same of Matt Mullenweg until recent months. Things can change.

We’ve actually seen this happen in small doses, like when Squarespace shut down the website for America’s Frontline Doctors. The question of “should they have shut them down?” aside, the fact is that companies like Squarespace have the power to do that with the push of a button. With WordPress, they don’t.

With WordPress, the worst case would be for your specific hosting company to decide to shut down your site, at which point you move to another host and keep going because you fully own your site.

This WordPress mess is frustrating, but it’s exactly the reason that we’ve been such a proponent of WordPress over the years. This may have long-term implications for the platform, but for now your WordPress sites will remain fully in your control and no one can take that away from you.

20 years of WordPress

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It feels hard for me to believe, but today is the 20th anniversary of the first release of WordPress (you can see the initial announcement here). The story of WordPress actually began earlier, with a project called b2/cafelog in 2001. It was a similar product that was essentially abandoned by its creators, so Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little took over development, renamed it WordPress, and released it on May 27, 2003.

I find it amazing that for everyone on our team other than me, WordPress has been around for more than half of their lifetime.

If you’re familiar with WordPress today, you’ll notice that the version from 2003 looks wildly different:

It was roughly a year later when I first tried it out, with my first post on May 24, 2004. It was quite a bare-bones system at that point, and I had to hack it just to add a normal editor and the ability to upload images.

Today WordPress powers 43% of the entire internet, which is staggering. The second most popular platform these days is Joomla, with just 2.6% of the web — far less than 1/10 of what WordPress has.

A big part of this reason is that growth begets growth. As WordPress has grown in popularity, there have been more themes and plugins created, and more people that know how to use it. As those have grown, it’s brought more people around and the cycle continues.

Own It

As I’ve shared many times on here, one of my favorite things about WordPress is ownership. Your can put your website on whatever server you want, and they can’t take that away. Most other popular platforms, such as Squarespace or Webflow, require you to use them for hosting. They’re great platforms, no doubt, but they (unintentionally?) put you in a very bad spot because they literally hold the keys to your website. With WordPress, that’s not a concern.

I still remember gathering with other folks at the 8BIT office in Atlanta for the 10 year anniversary, and it sure doesn’t seem like it was 10 years ago. Back then WordPress powered roughly 18% of the web, which was already a massive chunk. It’s hard to believe that it’s gone from being that dominant to now more than double the market share — and climbing!

2033?

It’s hard to say where we’ll be in another 10 years. I’m confident that this blog will still be using WordPress, but I don’t know for sure if that’ll still be our platform of choice at GreenMellen. I don’t foresee it changing anytime soon, but 10 years is a long time. If I find another platform that piques my interest, I’ll certainly be talking about it on here.

For now, though, we’re staying all-in on WordPress.

10 Years of Meetup

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Back in February of 2012, I attended WordCamp Atlanta for the first time (and that old site is still up!).

During that weekend I met some incredible folks, but the most immediately impactful was Kathy Drewien. We kinda, sorta, vaguely knew each other, and were able to talk more there. She knew I lived in her part of town, so she invited me to attend her upcoming Meetup the following week (the event listing for that is still around too!).

That’s where I first met some other incredible people such as Diana Nichols, Renee Dobbs, and the late great Brad Iroff.

As it turns out, Kathy literally knows virtually every skilled WordPress user in the Atlanta area, and hundreds around the country. I often said that if someone in Atlanta claimed to be a WordPress power user but didn’t know Kathy, then they were likely to be lying. That’s not totally true, but it’s really close. 🙂 She’s the “Dave” of WordPress in the southeastern US.

Kathy’s Meetup was excellent, but I quickly found a problem; one Meetup per month wasn’t enough for me. I figured I’d be the solution that I wanted to see, so we fired up our group that April, exactly 10 years ago today, and have been going strong ever since. Since then, a variety of other WordPress-focused groups have formed in the Atlanta area, including long running groups such as Melanie’s in Newnan and April’s in Woodstock.

Over the last 10 years we’ve had thousands of people attend ours, generally in little batches of 20-30 each month. We’ve met some incredible people, have learned more about WordPress and business than I could have fathomed, and we look forward to keeping it going for years to come.

We’re still hosting our events online for this, so anyone reading this can attend from wherever you live. Join our group on Meetup and I hope to see you at an event soon!

The right way to forward URLs

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When it comes to forwarding addresses on your website, there are a few different scenarios to consider.

First you have the “always forwarded” pieces like I shared a few years ago, to catch special URLs or typo domains.

The other scenario is when you build a new website to replace your old one, and want to make sure that everything still flows smoothly for the end user (and for Google). The technical side of it is relatively easy, but the planning behind it is where many sites drop the ball.

As an example, a local Chamber of Commerce near us recently launched a new website but failed to take this into account. Google still has 11,600 pages from their old site in their index, and virtually all of them are now “404 not found” errors because no redirects are in place. If they don’t fix this very quickly, the repercussions on their search presence will be massive and it will take many months for Google to understand all of the changes.

The basic plan

As I mentioned above, taking the time to simply plan out the move is really all you need to go. Google’s John Mueller recently shared a short video that talks through how Google sees this and what you should do to prepare:

Redirection

If you use the WordPress platform, the popular Redirection plugin will do most of the dirty work for you. Not only will it let you set up the redirects that you need, it will also monitor for 404 errors and let you quickly add redirects for those as well.

If you have trouble with this or need additional clarification, just reach out to me and I’ll be happy to help.

Making content that lasts

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The odds are high that you’ll create some kind of content today, with the majority of it likely being on social media. Will it last?

Seth Godin recently shared about the “cultural half-life” of ideas, and how our world is moving increasingly toward vaporous ideas that come and go as the social media algorithms move on to the next click of the day.

There’s really two aspects to what Seth is trying to say: systems and content.

Systems

For systems, I’m talking about sharing your ideas on a platform that you control so that they don’t fade away. With my site, I can easily reference back to posts from years ago (like discovering WordPress in 2004), which is much more difficult with social media. Using Facebook as an example, they weren’t even open to the public until 2006, and it’s likely that people will move on to other platforms over the next 17 years.

Content

The other side is content. I linked back to my old WordPress post, but it’s really not of much value today. It’s neat to point to it, but that’s really about it. The key on the content side is to write content that matters and will be valuable in the future, which is another issue altogether and is something I continue to work on for myself.

An Example

This came up for me recently when a friend published a great post about the future of WordPress. Myself and a few others left comments on his blog post to start some discussion, but most of the discussion happened on Twitter. The ease of discussion there is great, but it’s already essentially gone. Finding old threads on Twitter can be tricky, but finding that post on his blog will be easy to do into the future.

If someone looks back on how this particular WordPress issue was resolved, they’ll find his post (and our few comments there), but almost certainly miss the deeper discussion on Twitter. It’s a tough balance, but it serves all of us well to focus our efforts in areas that will last.

Website themes are not content

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When building websites, people are often concerned about not duplicating content across pages or sites. While there is no specific penalty for that, if Google thinks your website has the same content as another site, one of you won’t have a chance in the rankings.

So what does that mean for website themes and templates? If you use a popular one, are you at risk of facing duplicate content issues? In a word, no.

When Google looks at your content, whether it’s comparing it to others or just viewing the quality of it by itself, they’re looking almost exclusively at the actual text that you put on pages. The theme wrapped around it is just for show, and Google is well aware that many sites use the same theme as one another.

In a recent question posed to Google’s John Mueller (via SE Roundtable), a user asked “I create a WordPress theme and can I use it on multiple websites?”. John’s answer was clear, saying that “lots of sites use the same themes”.

Creating clear, concise, and valuable content is wildly important for your status online. Choosing the wrong WordPress theme could potentially cause speed or security issues, but Google won’t care a bit when it comes to content.

365 days of blogging

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While I have over 900 posts on this blog, going back as far as 2004, the last 365 posts have been published in the last 365 days. To be honest, I wasn’t sure how long I’d keep up the daily blogging habit, but it’s a year in and going strong.

If you have the desire to start blogging regularly, here are some posts that explain a bit more about why I’ve been doing this and how to get started yourself.

Why I’m Writing Every Day
Some thoughts on why I decided to start doing this.

Get Writing in 2021
Some related thoughts from Seth Godin on why you should blog daily.

Blogging beats journaling
Why I blog in public rather than journal in private.

To write more, read more
How I find ideas for new posts.

How I plan out my future posts
Some thoughts on getting my posts organized.

WordPress Editorial Calendar plugin
A great (free!) plugin that I use to help lay out my blogging schedule.

Sharing the posts I write
My daily plan (at least at the time) for sharing posts after they’re published.

365 are behind me, but the ideas are still piling up and I don’t plan to slow down anytime soon. If you have a blog you’ve been writing in lately, please share it in the comments below so I can check it out.

Sharing the posts I write

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Since I’ve started blogging regularly again, the way I share my posts each day has been slightly adjusted a number of times. I recently was asked for some details on that, so here you go.

Before I tackle that, though, there are two important things to frame this with. First, you need to understand why I’m writing every day, as that impacts how I choose to share these posts. In short, these posts are primarily for me, and I’m not looking to necessarily force people back to my website to get “better numbers”. Read them wherever is easiest for you, and I hope you find some value from them..

Secondly, I’ve shared a bit about my process of collecting ideas and turning them from ideas to posts, which you can read here. Today’s post is a continuation of that, sharing what happens when I press “publish”.

Publish on WordPress

The first part is pretty easy — I press the “publish” button on my WordPress blog. There are ways to schedule posts to publish automatically, but I prefer to give each post one final read through to hopefully have it error-free.

You can automate much of the sharing from there, but I do most of it manually. I figure if I’m going to put a lot of work into each post, I can spend a couple of minutes sharing them.

Import on Medium

Next I import the full post onto my Medium site. I use the “import” rather than just copy/paste, as it offers a few benefits for search engine optimization if you do it that way. This brings over a full copy of my post so if people choose to simply follow me there, they can.

Share on Substack

Next I share and publish on my Substack site. This is similar to Medium, but is really how most of my email subscribers get my posts. Substack is great for that! This post from a few months ago talks about why I use Substack.

Share on social media

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Lastly, I share the post on a variety of social media channels including my Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. There are ways to automate this, but I do these manually as well, for two reasons:

  1. I don’t share every post to every network. Some of the geekier posts I leave off of Facebook, and some of the more personal ones I leave off of LinkedIn. 90% of my posts end up on all of them, but I pick-and-choose at times.
  2. I customize the text I use to share each post, depending on the content and the audience.

Those social posts always link back to my main site, not to Medium or Substack, as that’s ideally where most people will follow me. Ultimately, though, it doesn’t really matter.

Five minutes

While that feels like a good bit of work, most days I can get it all done in about five minutes. I have a folder of bookmarks for the sites to share, so I just open them up, publish the content for each one, and move on with my day.

Wherever you’re reading this, I hope you picked up a new idea or two!

The magic checkbox

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I wrote yesterday about how you should work hard not to confuse Google, and one of the things I mentioned in there was to “make sure your site isn’t doing something stupid“. While that could mean a variety of things, there is one thing that rises above pretty much all of the others, and it’s far more common than I’d like to see.

If your site is running WordPress, there is a setting in the “Settings” –> “Reading” area of your dashboard that says “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”. It looks like this:

If you mistakenly leave that box checked, which is easy to do, Google (and Bing and others) will honor your request and completely remove you from their search engines. For most sites, this clearly has devastating consequences.

As an example, here is a site we helped a few years ago, showing their weekly website traffic, with the red arrow showing when we simply unchecked that box that they had mistakenly left turned on for a few years:

Perhaps more remarkably, that chart shows all of the traffic to their site. If you just look at traffic from search engines, it’s even more pronounced:

So why does WordPress even have that checkbox?

I know what you’re probably thinking — if this checkbox is so bad, why does WordPress include it as an option at all? The answer is development. If you’re building a new website for your company, it’s likely on a server somewhere so everyone can see the progress of it. However, you do not want Google to see that test site, so this checkbox solves that for you. The issue is that when the test site goes live and becomes the main site, people often forget to uncheck that box.

In our case, we have a rather extensive launch day checklist that we go through for every site that we launch. Most of the checklist is for items like this — things that are probably already in good shape, but we want to be absolutely sure that they are.

This likely isn’t an issue on your current site, but if you ever notice that your search traffic has completely dried up, or if you’re about to launch a new site, this is a great little place to look to make sure you’re not accidentally blocking Google.