Editing All Pages All At Once

by Mike Levin

In my continuing effort to practice “Best Foot Forward” SEO, I’ve de-linked all the old cruft off of my MikeLev.in homepage. All that old content is “orphaned” in that it’s still there, but no links are leading into it. When I do a https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amikelev.in search, it tells me there’s 406 pages. I think I’m going to turn my current automatic SERP email that’s performing a search on Mike Levin SEO over to this new site: modifier search so that I’m accumulating snapshots of Google’s (estimated) view of my site day by day.

Okay, I have to double-check a deliverable to work to make sure no data-pulls have been missed for something I did against a list of sites for a list of months. I think while I do this double-checking I’m also going to innovate on how I do my work here. I used to have a bunch of different “site journals” loaded at the same time in my vim buffers so I could edit the blog of a lot of sites at once. I trimmed that down a lot to only 1 published blog (this) and 3 unpublished journals. So I’m really only publishing on one site while I journal (auto-blogging) and only just the blog at that.

But when I do something I want to share in a more organized way than this blog, it’s quite difficult, and I’m thinking since I’ve trimmed back all the pages of my site (de-linked and orphaned them), I can also edit the organized pages. So why not load the Linux, Python, vim, git & blog markdown pages that Jekyll publishes, so I can continuously refine? No reason why not. I may even load the blog slice & dice files to make it totally meta, but once step at a time. Go edit /usr/local/sbin to get my linux.md, python.md, vim.md, git.md and blog.md files all loaded in memory. I’ll keep the homepage index.md as the last vim buffer so I can always :blast my way to the homepage.

Ugh, okay the project I’m putting aside for the moment is rendering mermaid diagrams in Github Pages. Okay, edit /usr/local/sbin/all to do the magic. It looks something like this:

pre = "~/repos/hide/MikeLev.in/"
edit_pages = ['linux', 'python', 'vim', 'git', 'blog', 'index']
edit_pages = [f"{pre}{x}.md" for x in edit_pages]
edit_pages = " ".join(edit_pages)
edit_journals = f"vim {journals} ~/.vimrc {edit_pages}"
system(edit_journals)

Okay, easy enough. Once I edit my all file, I just quit out of vim and run the all program again. That does all the work, and now I’m editing all those files at once. It’s fine to blank those. I don’t have to preserve everything I’ve ever written. It’s in the git history anyway.

Yeah, so I have 2 files from the skite static site generator system loading right along with the journal files, the main markdown files in my site and my .vimrc. The idea is that I can be editing all sites all at once.

Let’s try one of the tricks now that accelerates things. Let’s try using the category page to allow a trick to end up in the right place. That is to say, under the right sight section.

Pshwew, this has been a pretty intense session. I have significantly updated my workflow today.

• In my vim buffers, I’m editing 13 files.
  • My most important journal files (that slice & dice into blogs)
  • My most important main site pages (Linux, Python, vim, git & blog)
  • My .vimrc file
• I cleaned up my skite static site generator repo
  • I un-nbdev’itized the repo
  • I removed the blog tagline as an argument passed from site.csv file
• I “blanked” all my site’s main pages and put in blog query
  • I removed the blog itself from main nav (too long and unstructured)
  • I added the code so categorized blog posts appear on each page
  • I removed the arrows that let you surf straight through the blog
  • I deleted all the categorization done in the past

Wow, there is going to be a very publish-date oriented order. And I’ve got a good amount of categorization work cut out for me. This also suggests other to-do items, such as controlling the sort-order of the blog query. Having an ability to toggle active or inactive posts, etc.

Best Foot Forward SEO is a really big shift in thinking for me. It’s taking me some time to clean the slate. It’s the pack-rat in me with these online things, just like it is in real-life. I’ve got to get past that.