Welcome to week 49 of The Renegade Coder update! Only 3 more of these suckers before I move to a much better monthly format. Anyway, this week I did a bit of website housekeeping. In other words, I stopped writing and started decluttering.
Table of Contents
Search Engine Optimization
Lately, I’ve been working a lot on search engine optimization. If you’ve never heard that term, don’t worry. It basically means I’ve been trying to make my website more attractive to search engines. In general, that means I’ve been going through all my posts, pages, and categories and updating them to improve my SEO – according to Yoast.
I’m hoping some of it gets picked up by Google soon, so I can start getting better results. So far, my most successful posts on the site by a long shot are the following:
For those two posts, I’ve been getting tons of organic traffic. Pretty much everything else is a dud. In fact, my home page gets more traffic than most of my articles. For some reason, my home page has been showing up under python tutor, so that’s exciting.
Tag Removal
While doing some website housekeeping, I found that I had a ton of unused tags. These tags were actually generating archive pages on Google with no content. I figured that can’t be good for my search rankings, so I got rid of all unused tags.
Among this list were several tags from my old website like Zelda, Kirby, Hyaah, and plenty of others. With those cleared out, I should be seeing a noticable jump in my authority on Google. At least, that’s what I’m hoping!
Dead Link Cleanup
For the final bit of website housekeeping, I actually went through the process of removing all the dead links on my website. This included links to old GitHub repositories as well as Amazon products and old personal accounts like Patreon. I hear that dead links are pretty bad for SEO, so I hope this cleanup has done wonders for my rankings.
If you’re wondering how I did it, I actually just used a free site called broken link checker
. Then, I went to all the URLs it reported and fixed the links. At the moment, every link is clear.
Image Titler
On my journey of website housekeeping, I also managed to build a little application to help me add titles to my images. If you don’t know already, I get all of my images from Pixabay. However, they don’t come with the titles obviously. Instead, I’ve been using the Pixlr online photo editor, and it’s been great for me. I basically created a template and used it for all my images.
The problem is it is very time-consuming to find an image and edit it by hand, so I decided to automate it. Basically, I created a python script which quickly applies the same changes I would normally do by hand to any image I want. In fact, I’ve been so happy with this tool that I’ve even been making usability changes every so often. Maybe it’ll become a useful tool for others. Talk about added value. 🙂
Added Value
Last week, I mentioned that I got married. Well, during that weekend, I went ice skating thanks to my friend, Robert. I enjoyed it so much I figured it was worthy of a mention in this section. Ice skating may just become my new favorite hobby.
Also, I want to mention the Buford Highway Farmers Market. Morgan and I have been going there pretty much weekly since we moved down to Atlanta. It’s one of those things we’re going to hate to lose when we move. There are so many options for food, and it is all extremely affordable. This past weekend, I ordered:
- 1 x Russian Cabbage Roll
- 1 x Scoop of Russian Dumplings
- 1 x Lamb Samosa
- 1 x Scoop of Turkish Stew
- 2 x Curry Chicken Jamaican Patty
- 1 x Taco al Pastor
- 1 x Dr. Pepper
- 1 x Mandarin Jarritos
All for $14. What?! Talk about added value. We got food from all over the world for next to nothing, and it was all amazing. I love that place.
Coming Soon to The Renegade Coder!
It’s a big week for me. After all, I quit my job on Friday, and I don’t plan to start school until August. How’s that for a sweet deal. In the meantime, I’ll be pouring every waking moment into this site – within reason anyway.
Since it’s my last week, I’ll reiterate one last time that my series on why I quit my engineering career launches Friday at 10:00 AM. You’re not going to want to be the last one to read it!
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