Merry Christmas And Wisedocks Is Finally Back On Top
Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Boxing Day, Ōmisoka, Yule, Las Posadas, Festivus, and any other holiday I might have left out! I’ve completely lost my holiday spirit since my kids have grown up. On top of that, I’ve been sick for the last several days. However, I woke up on Christmas morning this year feeling much better. I’ll take that as a gift. Good health really is a great gift and becomes even more precious as I grow older. To celebrate, I took the opportunity to get in a good walk this morning—although I really wish my shins would let me jog for more than 100 feet without feeling like needles stabbing me constantly.
SEO Efforts Paying Off
I got an early Christmas present a few days ago: my SEO efforts have finally started paying off! Earlier this year, I made a little mistake with my RSS feed, which led to catastrophic consequences in Google search rankings. For five months, searching "Wisedocks" on Google wouldn’t bring up my site until the sixth page. The only related results were my social media profiles. But finally, the website is back on top where it belongs.
It’s been a long, hard-fought battle to reclaim my ranking. Looking back, though, I think it’s been a blessing in disguise. The situation forced me to make improvements I might not have focused on otherwise. I put in the work to refine schema markups, optimize images extensively, and zero in on website speed. The site was already fast, but I went to great lengths to ensure it loads in about one second, even on slower devices.
I’ve also decided to stop changing things up constantly and just focus on the blog for a while to see where it takes me. The other features I’ve created are still on the site but now live on the projects page, keeping everything more organized. For example, I finally started building the simple clicker game I’ve been wanting to make for ages. It’s still in a very basic stage, but I plan to expand it quite a bit over time.
The Future
Looking ahead, I think I’ll start phasing out the AI images and quote pages. Instead, I’ll repurpose the AI image gallery code to host the quote images. Right now, the quote pages are set up like mini biographies of the person with the quote images sprinkled in, but I don’t think it’s working as well as I hoped. Part of the problem is that I auto-generated the text on those pages using ChatGPT. It sounded good in theory, but it hasn’t performed well. I think focusing on the images themselves would work much better since they’re the real content and are far more shareable on social media.
For now, I plan to leave everything else alone. I’m not touching anything major for a while—I’ve already done enough damage to my site URLs this year! I’ll revisit this next year, lol. I might start adding the quote images to the gallery and slowly remove the AI images along the way, instead of doing it all at once. This approach should reduce confusion for search engines since I won’t be making massive URL changes in one go.
CSS Is Awesome
I added an awesome button to the homepage for the random rant, and I couldn’t be happier with it! I didn’t even code the button myself—I found it on CodePen. It was created by a user named Kshitij. Props to them for such a fantastic button with cool CSS effects! It’s rare to find something that fits so perfectly, but this one didn’t even need a color change—it matched my color scheme right out of the box. Sometimes, you just get lucky with these things!
