I’m going to try an experiment with providing regular (weekly?) updates about what I’m busy with on MEW.
Hopefully it’s useful as an indicator of the direction I’m busy pulling in, and then y’all can chime in with ideas, comments, or opinions for a correction of course.
The Plan: 2019-06-30T22:00:00Z → 2019-07-07T21:59:00Z
There is a short break in my current work schedule on Thursday, which will hopefully give me a chance to get some gaming in for a change.
Organise podcast recording date (next Monday)
Continue working on Ghost-to-Discord integration
Finish Discourse-Discord integration
Get backups of old avatars
Write some articles
Organise evening to play/stream Borderlands 2 (Monday after the Podcast recording?)
Play/stream Black Mesa (Saturday or Sunday evening)
Play/stream Warframe (whenever I’m not playing Borderlands 2) Organise/participate in MEWME (as long as it’s not on Thursday) {see comments below}
Post “What’s happening on MEW this week” to Discord and resurrect the forum topic
If there is still time after the above:
Troubleshoot Ghost post previews creating a forum topic
Switch to new version of Ghost theme
Icons linking to Discord and Instagram from Ghost (The above three issues are kinda related.)
Links to social media on Discourse
Related: Discord Widget for Discourse (?)
Create a (private) online repository for various MEW config files
Look into automated offsite backups in case something bad happens
Completed
Post scheduling works. Didn’t need to fix anything — the last update seemed to restore the functionality.
Progress reports
Discord integration
I can’t figure out what’s wrong with Ghost-Discord integration. I get this error: “The slack service was unable to send a ping request, your site will continue to function.” (Discord uses a Slack-compatible API)… YES! As I was typing this I had an epiphany and I fixed it! The WebHook URL from Discord just needed a /slack at the end!
Google indexing issues
The problem: Google’s crawler visits our site infrequently, and even crawled URLs sometimes don’t appear in Google Search.
I’ve looked in Google Search Console (Webmaster Tools) and used the URL Inspector there are apparently no problems with the site. If you want access to this to take a look and possibly help out, please let me know.
The only possible explanations I’ve found is that Google sometimes takes a week or more to index pages. Another possible explanation is that there is too much duplicate content in our articles and so Google doesn’t index them. However, it seems to index them eventually, so I don’t think it’s that. Some sources:
Not at all… If you have a working system, then by all means keep going! This was only if I was going to organise it this week. My Tuesday and Thursday evenings are spoken for.
Is it possible that the automatically generated forum post that gets created whenever a new post is made is causing Google to flag things as duplicated because it’s the entire post and it’s “published” at exactly the same time as the post itself.
Is there a way to change it so that only the intro paragraph at most goes into the forum thread, to see if that makes a difference? A little like how it’s done on MyBB.
Also a way to create the forum thread through the post author? Perhaps Google has Mewbot and Scribe flagged as serial “content duplicators” and just doesn’t like them.
For those who don’t have access to the #production section of the forum, here’s what I posted all that time ago (May 2018).
I didn’t end up opening up the discussion/vote to the whole community because the folks using the system where overwhelmingly in favour of sticking with Ghost (which, for the record, I don’t mind at all — it’s great)
So the reason I’m thinking about a possible switch to WordPress is because I’m always keeping my options open (technologically speaking).
One thing in particular that seems interesting is that the Discourse plugin for WordPress creates the relevant forum thread for articles in the name of the author.
In other words, the discussion thread about your article can be created by you, rather than mewbot. It also seems to enable the publication of posts to specific categories, rather than just The Scribe (we could therefore retire The Scribe category).
It should be noted that since this, there have been some issues reported with the Discourse WordPress plugin. I think it was after a big WordPress update and they’ve probably been resolved by now.
Just to keep in mind that WordPress isn’t some magic silver bullet — it will come with its own set of challenges.
Thank you
