So, I’ve been a bit of a busy bee in the last little while updating the website.
Because the default WordPress search engine, sucks, I’ve kicked it to the curbside and replaced it with a more advanced one. Don’t worry, it works and pretty much looks the same. The main difference is that it now works better. Instead of displaying results by date it now lists results by relevance AND is capable of searching all categories, tags, and custom taxonomies (more on those below) whereas the old one couldn’t.
Custom taxonomies (basically they’re another way of organizing content similar to story tags or categories) have been added to the website of the following types:
- Genre – Science-fiction, fantasy, action/adventure, etc.
- Universe – Spellbinder Universe, Earth Source Universe, Tales From Meridian Universe, etc.
- Book – This one currently only lists Psyren’s Redemption as I’m mainly using it to contain stories with multiple parts. Technically, I could list Battle for Earth or Ragnarok Rising under this taxonomy, but elected to use a series taxonomy for those instead.
- Series – Ragnarok Rising, Battle for Earth, Legacy of Earth, etc.
- Length – This one lists a range of story lengths so that you may find story in your desire lengths.
Any of the above every posts on the main page and any of the ‘archive’ pages as well as the actual page for the story itself. These taxonomies only apply to stories and not to blogs as I feel the current categories and tags are more than sufficient for blogs.
The addition of these new taxonomies not only allow me to better organize the site, but also to keep the lists of tags from getting so crowded.
In addition, adding these taxonomies have allowed me to do something I’ve wanted to do almost since I’ve launched the site, but haven’t quite figured out how, until now. If you click on one of the Series, Book, or Universe taxonomies you’ll be taken to a page that lists every single on of those stories or story parts. Not just a list of excerpts, but the actually text itself. In other words, if you clicked on the “Psyren’s Redemption” book taxonomy, you would find yourself looking at the full text of every single part of Psyren’s Redemption.
The only downside is that the posts are listed in ascending order, in other words newest on top. To get around that limitation, I’ve enlisted the help of a plugin that allows you to sort the posts by date (among other things) and you can now sort them in descending order. All you need to do is find the little widget on the right sidebar, right below the search bar and click on the ascending link which will toggle the text to descend instead. It’s only a stopgap solution until I can puzzle my way through all the coding and figure out how the crap I can get the page template to work the way I want. PHP isn’t my strong suite (a server side language which wordpress uses), but I can generally figure my way through it with enough time.
Everyone, have a delightfully demented night and be sure to check back Tuesday or Wednesday for the next part of Psyren’s Redemption.
Daniel A. Wolfe aka D.A.W.
