One of the challenges of creating a web design for your personal website is that you often don't know how you're going to use it. When we created the design for KTracy.com; we intentionally made everything as dynamic as reasonable with plenty of PHP Includes for flexibility in changing how the site would look. We also took that approach to setting up our directories. In general, that's been a blessing for us two years into development. There is one glaring exception, however.

The Archives.

Early on, Kevin Tracy told us that he wanted a place on the website for the old archives of his old content (which we have sporadic records of from 2001 through 2020). So, choosing to stay dynamic with our directories, we created an "Archives" page complete with an /archives/ directory for all the old content. Within this / archives / directory are directories for each year to help us better sort the content and hopefully speed up requests by limiting the total number of files in a given directory.

Meanwhile, new content was being stored in a /press/ directory. Unlike the archive directory, the press directory does not have a year directory organizing everything.

It works, but it's not elegant or future proof. Hypothetically, if we keep KTracy.com as a static website for another 10 years, the / press / directory is going to be enormous. Plus, since we only show the current month's updates on the front page, everything from November 2022 and earlier should be located in the / archives / directory.

The right thing to do would be to put everything in one directory.

So, that's what we're going to do after Christmas.

After Christmas, we're going to focus on combining the /archives/ and /press/ directories into one new directory called /news/.

Surely There Are Problems Reorganizing Content

We do have some advantages. Since the 2021 re-design, we lost a lot of our backlinks (links from other sites to KTracy.com) and have not re-built those backlinks (we were going to do that after the archive restoration was complete). That means we can change our URLs without suffering an enormous loss in web traffic or having to deal with hundreds of URL re-directs.

Also, because our archives are kept on one page, most of the internal links will be able to be fixed with a few "Find/Replace" queues.

It also helps that we have consistently named each article's page starting with the date in yyyymmdd format. This means we can do a Find/Replace to change every */press/2021* to */news/2021/2021*.

The bigger problem for us will be correcting the internal links on the individual articles. Our plan now is to hook up the KTracy.com Super Computer, open every PHP file making up KTracy.com and use Notepad++ to run the Find/Replace on every page.

But what about Search Engines?

Remember when we said we weren't doing sitemaps anymore? We're going to do a sitemap again after completing the change and force feed that new sitemap to Google using the Google Search Console. It's difficult to say how Google and other search engines are going to react to the change in the short term. In the long term, I suspect logarithm prefers a "news" directory over separated "archives" and "press" directories.

Once done, we're going to make the ktracy.com/news/index.php file REALLY hard for web crawlers to miss as news/index.php is essentially going to be our sitemap (similar to archives/index.php is today).

IndieWeb Update

While we're doing this update, we're also going to try and implement some IndieWeb tags on these pages to make them easier to find and organize in IndieWeb readers. Our goal is to be fully IndieWeb compliant by the end of next year (minus Webmentions; which pose some problems for static sites).

So hang in there at the beginning of the year. New content is coming!