Structuring content like a trail of breadcrumbs

This round of updates is all about organizing 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's more 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 decorative but for way-finding. A trail back up from wherever you are on the site back to the front door, whether that path runs through a category or through an author.

"About" and "Privacy" pages don't need them, conversely, 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.

The fun bit and the serious bit, two sides of the same coin.

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. Robust, yet elegant. Structure earns its place here or it doesn't go in.

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. I won't 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 underneath 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 it. The site looks fine. It just slowly becomes harder to find. Fortunately, it was flagged to me by my AI copilot in a routine code sweep.

Dull? Perhaps. Also the thing that quietly decides whether any of the rest of it is findable.

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.

Prompt for key visual

Midjourney: "a baker in an apron seen from behind, strolling away down a cobbled village lane, looking up and doffing his cap to a neighbour leaning out of an upper-storey window ahead and waving back, completely oblivious to the crusty bread rolls spilling from his tilted wicker basket, several oblong rolls fallen on the cobbles in the bright foreground with two or three small birds pecking and feasting, the fallen rolls and birds clearly lit in full warm colour, one roll torn open showing soft white bread, gouache illustration, bright fresh morning palette, soft morning sunlight raking in from the left and lighting the foreground cobbles, soft blue sky, terracotta rooftops, cream and honey tones, no deep shadows in the foreground, low contrast even lighting, gentle depth, baker centred and receding --ar 16:9 --s 350"