Magnolificent SMILE of Magnolias!
The Game’s Afoot! (Well, changes, anyway.)
I’m going to try something different. For the long of it, keep reading. For the less-long of it, cut to the Chase near the end.
Long of it:
As you can probably tell, this blog is a work in slow progress, but progress nonetheless. I have mentioned my challenge in constructing an effective search mechanism. My first attempt, decided on very late in the early stages of development, works, but it doesn’t do the job. If you’ve tried it, you know what I mean. It works. If you put in a search term, it will find the posts that have that term in it. But.
I think my average post has something like 2400 words in it. My tenth post summarized 11 cases with over 3700 words. My ninth also had 11 cases, with over 3350 words. My fourth and eighth each had 10 cases.
If you’ve tried to search, I’m not telling you anything you haven’t experienced. If not, I’m sure you can see the problem. The built-in search module in my WordPress site has simple skills, but nothing like, say, “find every paragraph that has the words X and Z within three words of each other.” Nope. You ask it to find “Restitution,” and it will find every POST that has the word in it. [Not the search engine’s problem. It’s a deficiency in my design of the site. (Which I’m working on fixin’, by the way.)] So if you want to find that restitution needle and 15 posts show up, what’er you gonna do? If you insist on the challenge, you’ll go to the first hit (the first post in the search results), and you’ll use your browser’s search- or find-on-page function to locate that search term on the page. In my example, for each post–whose average size is 2400 words. I hope for your sake you’re charging by the hour. I hope for your client’s sake you’re not charging by the hour.
Starting with my 12th post, I have been more careful to post only from four to six cases per post. But either the cases have been more complex or I have simply been wordier. That is not an exclusive “or.” The average word count on Post 12 through Post 26 is over 2,780.
What I would want, were I an attorney (and I AM an attorney, so I suppose I shouldn’t use the subjunctive), would be something that I could type “restitution” into the search box and the results would include only the CASES–not the entire POSTS–containing that term. The entry for the case might have several holdings, but I’d know that one of the holdings deals with restitution, and a quick scroll should isolate what I need pretty quickly. I would not have to wade through the four or five other cases in each post to see if the term appears.
Where am I going with this? Well, I do have someone who is working on spiffying up my website with a professional redesign. I don’t have a roll-out date yet. These things do take time.
But the best site in the world is going to be limited by the lowest common denominator, right? Just like when you or your tech people buy you a superduper fast Thunderbolt 5 backup drive that can ostensibly transfer data at 80Gbps, it is going to be limited by the speed of the port it connects to on your computer. I’m going to pretend in front of my similarly computer-challenged friends that I know what I’m about to say. You may have a drive that can transfer data at 80 Gbps, but if it plugs into a USB-A port, it slows down to something no faster than 480 Mbps. (Context, if the speeds hold, 80 Gbps can transfer data 166.7 times as fast as 480 Mbps. If you have a USB A port, it may be overkill to spend the extra for a Thunderbolt 5 drive, assuming it can even connect to USB A through adapters.)
So I may wind up with a fancier website than what I cobbled together myself (and I can guarantee it will be fancier), but it can only do so much with how I present my content. (I.e., the blog, the case summaries, the posts.) I’m the USB-A elephant in the room. Unless I change how I do it. And I’m gonna.
The Chase
Starting with Post 27, I am shooting for a one-case/one-post option. That is, rather than having four to six summaries per post, I will have just one case per post. I may post four to six posts at a time, so the cases will still all be presented at the same rate as they’ve been coming for the past 3 months. But when you search for a term, it will pull up only the individual cases that have that term (rather than posts that have several cases, including those that don’t have that term), because that will be the only case on the post with that term.
I can start doing that immediately, and it will look a little awkward in the beginning, because my vast audience (both of us) have been used to seeing a single web page that we can scroll down several feet worth of text, summarizing multiple cases in around 2400 words per post. Now we’ll see one summary only. And the average summary is around 400-420 words.
But wait, say you savvy folks! I can adjust my settings to show several posts on a single page of posts. Yay! If I set it to show four posts (or any other number it can handle), it won’t look like a single page single case.
And that’s what I hope to end up with. Right now, though, I have 26 posts to contend with that were not set up nicely for a single case per post. Maybe it’s okay to immediately say “show 4 posts per page” instead of “show 1 post per page” that I have it currently set at. Because maybe no one is going to go back to the prior (early) posts, where I regularly summarized six, eight, ten, or eleven cases. If I allowed four posts per page, then Post 9 through Post 12 will have summaries of 34 count’em 34 cases, all on one web page. Ay yi yi yi yi! In fact, other than one group of four posts yielding but 12 cases on a single page, the rest will have 17, 18, 20, and 27 cases per page.
(Remember, this is if I switch to four posts per page–which makes sense if there’s only one case per post. So those 17+ numbers are going to apply to the pre-Post 27 posts that have several cases within each post, because the new setting will be showing four multiple-case-summary posts per page.).
So what I’d LIKE to do is to go back to Post 1 (three cases) and turn it into three posts, Post 2 (seven cases) and turn it into seven posts, Post 3 (two cases) and turn it into two posts, etc.
But I don’t need to do that immediately. I could either of two things. I could wait until I’ve accomplished that, and in the meantime–beginning with Post 27–just post one case per page (which I’m going to start doing anyway), but to see the next case you have to go to the next post (or to the prior post, the way they are ordered on the site, I guess).
Or I could right now change to show, say, four posts per page. That would make those early Posts very long (some 17 to 34 cases on a page!), but given that I really don’t have a wide group paying attention, I doubt I would get many complaints. I could just change them into separate posts. Except I’m not sure what order they will appear in. A problem I guess I have to face if I choose to convert them at all. I could just let them be really long and not convert them to one-page/one-post status. I could put a little “Oh by they way, these first 26 posts are really really really long, like Lucy’s and Desi’s trailer, but beginning with the posts onward from March 8, 2026, you’ll like what I’ve done with the newer summaries.”
I’ll mull. I’ll also have to decide on the visual treats–the photos that currently appear on each blog. I think the terms of my agreement with my host place a limit on the size of my website (i.e., X gigabytes). I’m not exactly sure, but I think maybe the phrase “one picture is worth a thousand words” is outdated. Based on the average size of the photos I have posted, one picture is worth about 8,000 words, or around 20 average case summaries. I certainly don’t want to burn up my allotment of space (whatever it might be) with photos (though perhaps they’re more interesting than the summaries, vel non). So maybe I’ll have to figure on posting 1 photo per whatever number of “posts/cases” I display on my site. I could just do away with them, but I like them. And since I don’t know who you are or what you like, I might as well please myself, right?