It is hard to stumble yeah it is hard to fall
When you do you gotta bring it all back home

Updated – October 5, 2009

So we tried the new format and you basically said it sucks.

Well we are bringing it back  home back to the way NJN Network looked and worked before this summer.

It might take a week or two for the format to settle but the basics are there now. Thanks for your patience.

Adventures in site maintenance

In June we updated this site with what appeared to be a good newspaper theme from Grabfire. The idea was to jazz up the page, make it easier to find stories and add advertisements.

By mid-August Google had essentially stopped looking at the site.

We scratched our heads to sort it out. There were a few broken links and we fixed them.

There were hundreds of duplicate meta tags and Google does not like them. It looks tag stuffing to increase the Google rating. They arose from a misunderstanding of how “All In One SEO” works.

We started cleaning them up. It’s a big job to go back through the last 1000 stories. That wasn’t the problem since we have been using All In One since January.

We prepared a site map but the first server-based tool would stop at 1,700 entries. We changed to a client side tool called Inspyder Sitemap Creator which created a site map with about 4,000 URLs which is logical for 2,800 stories and 1,200 comments.

That tool told us there were over 40,000 URLs – a duplicate database, story revisions and the accumulated junk of 9 months work. We cleaned it up removing revisions and got the number down to 12,000 URLs.

Still not much response from Google.

Saturday morning I awoke on a mission from God. I had checked with friends who said they liked the old format better. We reverted to the original WordPress theme.

So far so good. Google is bouncing posts back like it used to do. The site is cleaner and easier to maintain. There was something in that Grabfire theme that Google bots didn’t like.

I have about three months of old stories to clean up…a few a day.

It was quite a learning experience.