ActiveRain Spring Cleaning Challenge for March 2017
Debbie Laity issued quite a lofty task to ActiveRain members in her It’s Time for Some Spring Cleaning with the Spring Cleanup Challenge for March 2017. The extra points are a nice incentive to get going on cleaning up some old posts, but truthfully it’s something we should probably be working on year-round to fix those dirty older posts.
The challenge of Spring Cleaning, and with cleaning up some of my old posts, is getting started, as it is with many tasks which aren’t necessarily fun despite being important.
I admit to a bit of procrastinating, but once I jumped in it wasn’t too bad, other than how much time it took, which was longer than expected.
No doubt there are far more posts that needed cleaning up than I had time to do this month, so the plan was to focus primarily on popular community posts that I use over and over in links in other articles (e.g., market reports, listings). They were intended to be evergreen when written, but some are pretty old and go back to 2007 and 2008.
Because things change in communities over time, or my thoughts did about what needed to be included now that was neglected before, those issues had to be fixed. Many of these posts have well over 15,000 views, so I used the statistics and sorted the posts to have a list of those with the most views and selected 10 posts (or maybe I did more), although not just the top 10. I also looked at some other popular posts that were not community–focused.
Li
ke Spring Cleaning, sometimes one thing leads to another; you are working on one post and fixing links, text, photos and other matters, which led to other posts that also need some cleaning up, and before long there was a chain of linked posts that had to be dealt with stemming from just one post.
I’ve tended to do a fair amount of linking to other articles I’ve written on AR so this issue came up often.
Here are the major changes I ended up making – probably the same stuff others have come up with that needed fixin’.
And perhaps there are some tips that others can use for their cleaning this Spring, or anytime!
1. Changing the font from 10 or 12 to 14 where needed. I was not consistent with font size when I started writing. Go figure.
2. Adding large header photos – we couldn’t do that until recently and these photos are a great addition to the community posts I wrote in the past. And I have more photos now to select from than I did back then, and a better camera. And perhaps my photography skills have even improved over the years with the thousands of pictures I’ve taken…about 27 GB on my laptop alone.
3. Fixing broken links. Oh, my, how annoying to find so many links that no longer worked, for a variety of reasons. In some posts this was particularly time consuming. I found a number of links (http://) that have now changed to https:// to reflect the recent security improvements that are recommended (SSL certificates), so I had to correct them.
By the way, is YOUR blog or website compliant with SSL? Have you noticed the new version of Firefox now lets you know about security, or lack of, for sites that are not SSL compliant when you are logging in?
4. I added or enlarged plenty of photos. My brain was not with the program back then and while I knew to include photos the sizing was off, and some of the quality was not very good. I fixed that by enlarging some photos and adding others, plus deleting a few that were downright ugly. What WAS I thinking? I also added more spacing around photos to improve the look and readability, and add more white space.
5. I took the liberty of deleting some spam comments I was not aware of. I admit I have not been back to check on comments since these posts were written years ago, and found a number that I reported, and later deleted.
I also noticed I was not doing a great job of responding to all comments – a reminder to always think about that these days!
6. In recent years I have created some slide shows using Animoto, and then uploaded them to YouTube. So I added some of these to the community posts I edited where I had the shows available. This was also a wake-up call that I have more slide shows I can, and should, create to add more visual appeal and interest for readers, especially buyers who are relocating and who want to learn more about different neighborhoods than I can easily put into words. And traffic from uploading these slide shows to YouTube is not a bad thing.
7. I corrected typos, plus added and deleted content and links (e.g., restaurants that closed).
8. We couldn’t add meta descriptions way back then so I made some adjustments here, as well as fixing some of the SEO titles. Some of this stuff in the old days was terrible, but then we know so much more now…thank you Activerain!!
9. I admit some of the formatting stunk and lots of cleaning was needed – yes, that was due to my lack of knowledge, and maybe laziness. I’m not sure I know all that much more now, but I was able to make some posts appear more attractive when needed, at least I think so!
10. The calls to action were minimal or non-existent so I took care of that, too. Clearly I wasn’t thinking much about this when I started out blogging! But I don’t recall that it was really discussed all that much in the early years. Or perhaps I was in the fog!
11. I also added home search links (clickable photos) that were missing in the original community posts. WHAT was I thinking?! I wasn’t!
The Spring Cleanup was an interesting journey back in time, too. There are so many faces on old post comments that are no longer around, perhaps having moved on to other things. It made me wonder what these friends are doing now – did they simply tire of blogging, or become more focused on their own outside blog?
By going back so mnay years (2007 in a few cases) it was also interesting to see how my writing has changed…hopefully for the better.
Lastly, it was very apparent that the spirit and soul of AR we see today was very evident in the early years, with lots of supportive comments, plenty of sharing and learning, and making new friends along the way, some of whom I now have known for almost 10 years!
Thank you, Debbie, for a wonderful challenge!
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