Websites as a One Person Shop
I took over the websites for Our Aberdeen and they were WordPress sites. WordPress uses a lot of plug-ins for various features and they are typically third-party programs.
They had zero data on page views for the multiple years their sites had existed and I was reluctant to add a plug-in because although I have spent substantial time hanging out on Hacker News and I do have a Certificate in GIS and I do know a little HTML and CSS, I'm not really a programmer.
So I know enough to know those third-party plug-ins can be malware delivery devices. You get free tracking data or whatever, they get free credit card data or something.
But I don't know enough to easily identify which third-party plug-ins are malware or look likely to be malware. So I convinced Our Aberdeen to let me move their sites to blogspot in part because blogspot has statistics built in and it's from Google, not a third-party you have to wonder about.
Blogspot is fairly plug and play. I originally hand coded my sites, which is why I know some HTML and CSS, and it ate all my time handling the backend coding and reduced how much actual blogging I got done and that's a factor in why I grew increasingly skeptical that Main Street America actually works. I know from firsthand experience if you need to do a bunch of other stuff first, like backend coding or bureaucratic paperwork, before you can even do the thing you WANT to do, like publishing your writing or economic development, you accomplish vastly less of the thing you actually want to do.
So I moved to WordPress for a time and later blogspot. Blogspot has a long list of templates but the last four are the most recent ones and those are designed to be mobile friendly designs.
We live in a mobile-first world. With the rise of cell phones, anyone anywhere in the world can get online with a cheap phone and website design has changed because of that to prioritize making it work on a mobile device.
That doesn't actually mean "cell phone" per se. It includes tablets and that design standard was probably ushered in more rapidly than it otherwise would have been because I was openly homeless while being the most prominent woman on Hacker News and I frequently complained about being on a cheap tablet and stuff not working for me online.
Eventually the internet started working better for both tablets and phones and I stopped making that complaint. People who were not willing to help me directly but who worked in the IT world likely kept that in mind -- even if not consciously -- when doing what they do at work and that likely pushed things over some important tipping point leading to where we are today with our mobile-first world.
Blogspot keeps all of its old templates active and hasn't retired them because there are old sites still using older templates, but I ONLY use their four most recent ones because they are mobile friendly and the older templates are not. I predominantly use two of the four and really increasingly use one of the four while getting gradually crankier about wishing it did something else.
If you look back through the archives of this site, you may notice that older posts frequently include an embedded YouTube video. That coding still works if I don't touch it but it breaks if I edit anything in a post that has that code. Found a typo? If I fix it, I'm losing that embedded video and need to update it to a link if I want to keep it.
So I can no longer embed videos and, happily, I don't care. I like the clean design I have for this site but it evolved out of a process over multiple years.
Those older posts used embedded videos a lot so the video would show on the landing page instead of a garish yellow box. The site was a black template but I updated the photo on the landing page to a nature-themed stock photo of a streambed full of rocks which gave me a predominantly black and beige website except active links were yellow which was fine except it made the boxes for each blog post a big block of yellow on the landing page.
The occasional block of yellow wasn't a big deal but I didn't like looking at a wall of garish yellow boxes on the landing page.
The current theme is the same template but a different color scheme. I originally used it on a website called Doreen Traylor Designs with this cream background and the brown-blue-white color scheme I like but a lighter version of it where white was the dominant color instead of brown. The striped icon in any browser tab comes from the now defunct Doreen Traylor Designs site as well.
I had a couple of other mostly brown with blue websites with related writing. I eventually folded most of that writing in here and took those sites offline.
That's extremely important real estate where you want to put stuff you want a lot of eyes on and you don't want to clutter it up a whole lot. You want a short list of super important stuff above the fold and I increasingly think of "How can I still make this readily findable without taking up too much real estate?" as this site grows and I'm starting to juggle more balls and working on keeping things both findable and uncluttered.
So when I unpinned that piece, I added the label 101.Read.Me to it so it's on a still short list of posts only one click away using a link that's above the fold.
At one time, I subscribed to some Reddit sub for photos and they had a pinned post with information on laws for all US states and maybe some other countries. I unsubscribed and don't remember which sub it was, but the short version is you should generally err on the side of NOT posting photos online of random strangers or anything sensitive, like license plates and street addresses, that could potentially cause problems for them and potentially get you sued.
In many places, it's the law that you need the written consent of human subjects to publish their photo. If you aren't doing something like filming the police for activism purposes, there's probably no real need to include photos of people and you should generally keep the photos of children off the Internet for safety reasons.
If you are doing something like filming the police for activism purposes, that's not my wheelhouse. You should look up information on that elsewhere.
This is one reason I historically embedded YouTube videos: Because their embed code amounts to legal permission to use it on my websites. There are sources for third party content, like stock photos or maps, and you need to read the fine print and typically are required to list the source when you use stuff like that and taking your own photos doesn't entirely sidestep the issue because you may need permission to use your OWN photos from people depicted in those photos.
Historically, it was considered to be a best practice to add things like photos and videos to make your sites more appealing and help you gain traffic. I'm generally a boring, nerdy fuddy-duddy and I no longer care to try to play that game.
I'm interested in putting out useful information and if that's not why you are here, I'm not interested in trying to be entertaining and eye catching and I increasingly think about people in very remote areas with spotty internet access and how things like video clips are a burden for them.
So I still include links to clips but I'm perfectly okay with the embed code no longer working on blogspot and my sites are slowly losing the embedded videos because I periodically go back and edit something for some reason knowing it breaks the embed code. When I do that, I try to redo it as a link so it's still available but no longer automatically downloaded as heavy data usage slowing down people in the middle of nowhere and no longer visually cluttering up my site and no longer participating in a click bait culture.
