This weekend I decided that I wanted an easier way to look up things I had written by the topics I’m writing about. I’m a fan of normalized data so I started by creating a couple tables. One for the tags aka topics that I’ve written about, and one for a link between my posts and the topics. I was day-dreaming the user interface for these topics and had started muddling through creating some endpoints when it occurred to me that I already had topics that I had applied to the posts in the way of a string of topics used for SEO (search engine optimization). With this end mind I decided to write a script whose job would be to loop through all of my blog posts and process the tags/topics one by one. This script would create the tag/topic if it didn’t exist and then create the link between the posts and the tags. After debugging that process it occurred to me that a similar process could be used so that the user interface for maintaining the tabs could be the existing blog post form, as is, without any changes. This could be accomplished by taking the existing seo data, spiting it by commas and then processing the topics/tags one at a time. All that was left was code to clean up anything that was removed when editing posts.
2023 came and went in a flurry of Zelda breath of the wild and then I got pulled into Boulders Gate 3 for a solid six months and next thing I new it it was 2024. I would have posted sooner but there were php 8 compatability issues that i had to solve and then had some file upload issues with this site. Got everything working a few weeks ago and then I ended up finishing up the cutting board for my wife without much fan fare as i didn't record any of it for social media. Today I spent some time working on automaticly resizing photos for the blog so i don't have to mess with photoshop or gimp to get content out quickly.
The other project that I took on today was to document the differences in my Saturday morning Tik-Tok topics from this year vs around the same time last year. Seems like Tik-tok shop content has replaced more than 1/3 of the organic content that Tik-tok served up around the same time last year.
