Ratholes and Tangents

Hey kids, let’s write a blog post about ratholes and tangents!

I wanted to take a second and tell you a little “behind the scenes” story of how sometimes even when you’re firing on all cylinders, you end up taking a detour…

So if you’ve been paying attention here the last couple of weeks you know I’ve been doing a lot of work across the board, but mostly here at JohnHenry.US. I’ve got a couple of huge new articles up, a handful of smaller ones, and entire new sections of the site.

As I write this there’s still some flash that needs to be trimmed all over, but this is about the rathole so ignore that part and check out this page real quick. Just peek and scan, there’s not much there in the way of words.

Now look at the front of this site.

The front of this site should be that “Home” page, but this theme won’t let that happen. Why? Don’t know, and hacking through the internals to track it down would take weeks. Harumph.

Guess I have to try a new theme. I’ve got all kinds of new branching internal content set up and planned and executing (like this) that’s designed around this theme with the same basic setup of hero banner on top, pages and posts below, and sidebar, so we’ll try to stick to something close to this layout…and nothing works.

I noticed this problem late Wednesday night.

I tried almost forty themes on this site yesterday, and the ones that would properly render the “right” home page, ended up having other major content formatting issues that made them unusable or would have forced me to redesign the entire site again.

There’s probably a fairly easy solution to this, but nothing jumped out at me in the theme code, and all the available Google solutions are dead ends. I even gave some serious thought into using WordPress’ new “Site Builder” feature, which is rather deeper than simply theming, but again this would be a huge rathole that would take me weeks to crawl out of and bring my forward momentum to a dead stop. (Note to self: make time for that rathole once you’re back in production.)

I’ve been trying to improve a lot of things about myself over these last few weeks that I’ve been quiet, for me, since I moved out of the motel. On one hand, I’m not in a crisis which demands that I just keep paddling as fast as I can and hope I hit land before I sink, so I can take the time to find the right solution. On the other hand, I know I’m prone to getting lost in these ratholes and tangents,

So I gave it one day. I mean, it’s the entire site design, right, so it’s okay to take a minute and see what you can do to make it exactly the “right” way you want it. But again: let’s not lose momentum or get into tangents of tangents of tangents, or all this stuff you’ve started doing is going to get lost.

Turns out: no good solution! I spent a day fiddling with different themes trying to make it work, and consistently the themes that fit reasonably well into the aesthetic and UI I had in place, will not render that home page as the root page of the site no matter what I do to it.

So the home page of the site is just gonna have to be vaguely mis-matched from the rest of it from now on. Hardly anyone visits home pages anymore anyway. Plus I can rig it a little bit by taking the time to properly set up my site’s page structure, using the “right” page as the root of the site tree, and then the breadcrumbs should use that as home and get SOME traffic pointed there.

So today it’s back to the tangent I was on…getting the gaming section of the site set up and a bit of content in it, then setting in to a production groove for a minute with new content coming in there and in other areas of my work…and at that point I can start thinking of doing the same things with music, film, books, TV/streaming, IT geek stuff, and all of the other things that interest me.

I figure it’ll be a year – and probably at least one more site redesign – before I’ve got this site in the condition I want it to be. The good news about that is it’s all one-time work that I frankly should have done twenty years ago anyway. Not only is it all scalable and amounts to a bunch of plug-and-play content boxes, the same techniques and some of the scripting I’ve written and so forth can also be used on Custode and WeAntiFascists, and it will be.

The same is true for some of the less major tangents I’ve been on this last week and a half or so – changing my SEO tool from Yoast to RankMath, adding and changing all kinds of back-end tools and plugins for the site (talked about some of this in last week’s Substack – make sure you’re signed up, all you gotta do is punch your e-mail address in the sidebar form on my site or go to my SubStack home page and punch it in there – always free!), most of which will also be implemented on my other sites. (The WAF site is set up a little differently with less metric/traffic monitoring and no advertising implemented whatsoever…so that’s like six different tools that aren’t used over there, or are used in substantially different ways.)

The first edition of the JH AfterParty newsletter goes public in a couple of hours, be sure to keep your eyes out for that please and thanks. Let me get back on the game section and get that wrapped up (mostly design elements and I want to get a few more Fallout 4 screenies posted, plus get the Cities:Skylines section started), then I’ll start picking up on the half-dozen articles I’ve got almost finished for other platforms (all my sites plus Medium, plus I need to get my Substack newsletter written so it’s ready to roll in the morning).

Finally just a quick personal note: yes, I recognize that from “out there” it looks like I’m kind of up my own butt right now, but that’s what happens when you’re a one-person conglomerate. I’d love to have some folks working for me to handle like 85% of this so I could just focus on writing, but that’s life in the big city. I’m sure there’ll be no shortage of social justice issues to discuss – and I have been even in the middle of all of this – so please don’t be concerned that I’ve decided to stop doing what I do and just focus on “light” stuff like gaming and music. I have a rich, full intellectual and artistic life, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of it in my public work. I’m starting to get some of that stuff out there now, because it’s interesting and – as I’ve mentioned before – I frankly have much less ethical quandry related to monetizing that stuff as opposed to public interest work that ought to be free. Ironically this will end up resulting in the other stuff generating the income necessary to do the social and public interest stuff well.

That’s it for me for now. I’m not going to set a schedule on “My Actual Blog,” but am trying to make sure I hit it at least once in every calendar period.