Showcasing all that you do in one place isn't easy
So I applied a new theme to this website today in hopes that I can get things looking halfway decent. You see I’ve had this domain and my old domain abstrakone.com for quite a while and it’s changed look and feel a lot over the years. Whenever I’d lose my job and I started looking for a new one I’d slap on a fresh coat of paint and clean it up a bit.
Slap on a fresh coat of paint
Today’s reasoning was a bit different, I’m still employed, but I thought the site needed to looks nice for me, not for a potential employer. You see, I’m a web developer and I speak at and attend events so I want a place for people to find more about me. Since I’m a “web developer” and not a “web designer” I can get away with the site looking somewhat stock which is why I ended up with the “twentyfourteen” theme with some slight modifications to it.
My goals
I have a few short term goals here, I want to show the things that I’m doing such as the various podcasts and web shows as well as links to each episode. Since I don’t blog much I thought that these things were more appropriate for the site then some post from 2 years ago. I have a few other websites that I put content on so I want to bring in some of those links to each of the posts. Mainly I want to make this site a aggregation site for all the stuff I do around the interwebs.
websites: wpwatercooler.com, wpmedia.pro, geekfit.com & ocwp.org
Why it isn’t easy
One of the things I didn’t want to do was to have the site display ALL of the content from each site, but just an excerpt and may the thumbnail or featured image. I use a plugin called FeedWordPress to do that and it works quite nice. The hard part is that I do this aggregation trick with a few of my other sites too. The trick here is to not have duplicate content being pulled from 2 different places. I end up excluding categories on the aggregation site and including only categories that I think are worthy of replicating to this site.
What about the aggregated content?
Luckily FeedWordPress is smart enough to know how to handle changes to the feed. It can delete and change content when it detects changes from the remote source. In case I change a posts title or excerpt it can go back and update those too. One clever thing it does is that it can set the permalink to the the remote URL. This way I don’t have to copy all the content and display it in its regurgitated state on this website. That way when you click the link you get sent over to the source website. I don’t care if Google likes that or not I just want to make it easier for people to see all the stuff that I do and enjoy that content.
