Earth Notes: On Website Technicals (2018-06)

Updated 2024-06-18 06:10 GMT.
By Damon Hart-Davis.
Tech updates: creating a skim-friendly content pyramid, and post GDPR-calypse.
tools
Trying to make a consistent 'content pyramid' for readers' benefit is a continuing effort. This allows summaries to appear featured on the front page, to be marked 'speakable', etc. (I am adding this page's intro along with other such retrospective improvements at the start of 2019, for example.)

2018-06-18: After the GDPR-calypse

Ad revenue was essentially zero, ie less than 1p/day, from my GDPR-friendly changes until 13th June. Then there were some signs of life again... Indeed I had quite a decent day (in recent terms) yesterday.

: revenue is back to "dead", to a reasonable approximation!

: revenue is now somewhat feeble, but non-zero, even having applied California non-personalisation too.

: revenue is very roughly £1/month; I hope that as creepy personalisation options go away for everyone my traffic may recover some value!

2018-06-09: Content Pyramid

There's a notion in grown-up writing of a "content pyramid". A very brief summary in the headline, more detail in the sub-head, and more detail still in the first para(s). Then the whole thing from the start again in depth. Sort of an automatic executive summary that fills out more detail as the piece continues.

That helps people wanting to quickly skim a piece to see if it has value for them.

For EOU the headline gets some more exposition in the description. Now I have added an optional "page intro" CSS class pgintro. That paragraph may be quoted under the headline and description if the article is featured on the front page, for example. This may also in future be styled differently at some point, eg on the desktop.

I have marked up such an intro/summary paragraph in every featured article for the next couple of months, to be going on with.

(Code was then added to the site build system so that this intro para becomes automatically marked up as the abstract of the containing schema.org/CreativeWork.)

~410 words.