‘Technical Articles’ and ‘Home Automation and Monitoring’ Pages Restructured

WordPress, the software used to manage this blog site, has two main types of ‘container’ for content:

  • Pages which are the more ‘structured’ way to manage text and images, typically arranged into a hierarchy of parents and children which are directly accessible from the menu bar
    • These work best for relatively long and comprehensive articles on particular topics, which include a structure of headings and sections
  • Posts which are shorter, less structured and form a ‘timeline’ view where the two most recent posts appear on the home page and others are available by following ‘Older posts’ links – or by picking a date in the calendar
    • These work very well for the daily ‘Regular Updates’ while building work is underway, or other ‘news’ – which might include the publication of a new Technical Article

Both types of content can also be found using Category keywords or by the search function – and both are also indexed by Internet search engines.

The Technical Articles menu has been getting a bit unwieldy and lacking a sensible structure. Some of the entries in there really belong in the adjacent Home Automation and Monitoring menu, which was added later but never rationalised.

So I’m doing a bit of housekeeping:

  • Adding a deeper hierarchy of menu levels to collect the Pages into a more logical structure
  • Splitting / combining some pages to align better with that new structure

While WordPress seems pretty good at persisting the URLs for Pages – even when they move under a different ‘parent’ – there’s a chance some links might not work. Things will also be a little untidy while the housekeeping is underway (for the next few days at least).

I’m also working through the 25 Pages that were sitting in Draft status, without ever having been Published – generally because their content was not considered ‘finished’. I’m now taking the view it’s better to have them Published – ideally with some sort of placeholder content to indicate that they’re not to be considered complete – than to have them sitting as a Draft for months or years.

Outbuildings: Week 2, Day 1

Outbuildings: Week 2, Day 1

The footprint of the buildings is clearly taking shape as the ground was further levelled out ready for the foundation trenches to go in – and the natural slope of the site is more clearly evident.

Just out of shot to the left there’s a mini crusher ready to work on the pile of concrete chunks from the demolition of the old floor slabs – though those need a bit more preparation to remove the reinforcing steel from some of the pre-cast concrete units.

Mini-crusher ready to start work on the pile of concrete chunks

This was the first of the reinstated automated daily posts, where a simple placeholder with a site photo from 12:00 gets uploaded every weekday – then manually edited later. WP-CLI does most of the work.