Structuring content like a trail of breadcrumbs
A deep dive into pagination, breadcrumbs, category and author pages, and sitemap maintenance. All this, and content modelling too!
This round of updates is all about organising content: the scaffolding that underpins the site as you navigate its pages.
Implementation was a big and weighty undertaking drawn out over several days. But now it's finally done, I can sit back with a nod of satisfaction.
The intention here isn't to produce more content, but to provide additional pathways to finding it. My favourite new feature, for example, is the classic breadcrumb trail perched atop the majority of pages.
But there are more updates to talk about, and they all deserve the spotlight equally. The net result (I hope) is a better experience for readers and visitors.
1. Pagination
This headline feature, such as it is, sits at the bottom of the page.
The blog now paginates when the list of posts has grown longer than five items. It's done using a single primitive function that can be called into action everywhere.
The front page uses it, every category page uses it, and the new author pages use it, too. Down the line, if I dream up another grouping for the blog that accumulates a library, that will have pagination too.
This single-implementation discipline is pretty awesome, I think. Build the thing once, reuse it whenever and wherever it's needed.
2. Navigation, with lovely golden breadcrumbs
The visible navigation changes are modest. A couple of additions to the top nav, a tidy footer. Tough to fill a paragraph just writing about those.
The breadcrumbs, though. I think they're terrific. Their purpose isn't for decoration but for way-finding. A trail back up, from wherever you are on the site, back to the front door. And that path runs through a category or through an author.
"About" and "Privacy" pages don't need them, by contrast, because they're only one step removed from the homepage.
Getting that trail to be truthful on every page where it appears (and to judge when it shouldn't appear at all) was more fiddly than it looks. But totally worth it.
3. Categories and authors
Two ways into the same body of writing, but from different angles. Categories sort content by what a piece is about. Authorship sorts content by who – or what – wrote it, which on this blog includes a yeti and a robot. The landing pages for both are deliberately playful.
But beneath the surface, the underlying architecture means business. Like the primitive used for pagination, author pages and category pages are the same machinery pointed at a different axis; they slotted in cleanly and will keep evolving as the site grows.
A fun bit and a serious bit, both shipped as one improvement.
A snapshot of the content model underpinning this blog.
4. The content model held its shape
All of this needed adjustments to the underlying content model, and I'm pleased with how easy it was to make adjustments.
The author content-type needed a slug and a bio to be added, both mandatory fields going forward, plus settings like a regular expression to keep the URLs clean and the titles unique. Robust, yet elegant. Nothing goes into the model unless it addresses a specific need.
I've deliberately kept the cruft out of the model so far, and yes, that means no rows of social media icons. If you want to share a post, you're a grown adult with a clipboard. Not going to stop you, but nor will I install five tracking scripts behind a single share button.
5. Sitemap maintenance
Then there is the sitemap and metadata pass, prompted by everything above.
New pages mean new URLs, and new URLs mean the machine-readable layer has to keep up, including the sitemap, the canonicals, and the structured data that tells a search engine what each page actually is.
These tasks are the easiest category to overlook precisely because nothing visibly breaks if you skip them. The site looks fine, but it gradually slides into a state of dysfunction as you publish more content.
Fortunately, the issue was flagged in a routine code sweep by my AI co-pilot. Dull? Perhaps. But still important.
Where next?
So, that's the last of the major overhauls to the underlying code and architecture for the site. I'm happy with where it stands for the moment. The next couple of posts will be written by Genial Yeti and Trippy Robot, probably. But don't worry, I have a few more ideas I'd like to tackle for the design of the blog. More updates, soon.
