Site Clean-Up Update and Organization to Surface Information Better

Anthropomorphic cat computer technician standing in front of a vintage mainframe computer. Image created with Stable Diffusion.

As I wrote about two weeks ago, I realized that the blog side of dynamicsubspace.net needed a serious cleaning to improve its information architecture. There were numerous posts with dead links as well as removed video and images that erased the context and purpose of the page. There were posts lacking relevance to what I wanted to use the site for. There were posts that had not received any views in over 10 years. And there was the issue of my poorly thought out categories and the related issue of tag proliferation.

Since that post, I’ve whittled the categories down to 28 from 30, slashed the tags to 187 from 1,300, and removed 234 posts from just over 1,600 (making yesterday’s post the new post number 1,400). Also, I searched for posts by keywords and re-applied Categories and Tags to help relevant information surface easier through the Categories and Tag clouds in the right sidebar and the relevant posts shared at the bottom of each post (when you click through the title or land on a page through a search engine).

These principles that I’ve learned should apply to any personal website:

When initially developing your site, take the time to write up a plan that includes its purpose and goals, a list of categories that encompass the kinds of writing that support your your site’s purpose and goals, and a list of possible tags that give granular detail to your categories (knowing these will increase over time).
Review your posts manually and using tools like Google Search Console to search for deadwood, such as posts with dead links, out of date or irrelevant information, removed embedded content hosted elsewhere, etc. If those posts are cross-linked on other posts or pages, you will need to track those down and remove the links.
Review your posts’ Categories and Tags. If your Categories change, they might need to be reapplied to some posts. And with your tags, new tags that have relevance to older content should be applied to help build connections and surface that content for your visitors.
Don’t be afraid to delete. It’s your site, so you get to make the executive decisions about what the site should offer your audience. Old, outdated, broken, and no longer useful information might be choking your audience’s access to the information that your site is providing.
If you keep your site’s posts relevant and labelled appropriately, you can help your visitors discover the information they are looking for that you provide.

Cleaning Up the Site

Anthropomorphic cat technician working in a cyberpunk computer server room. Created with Stable Diffusion.

I registered DynamicSubspace.net in 2007, but I imported content that I had begun writing in 2006. That means that the site’s content has been growing for about 17 years. I’ve written over 700,000 words across over 1,600 posts, which doesn’t include the pages with bibliographies and other information. The posts were categorized in over 30 categories and 1,300 tags.

Watching the steady decline of site views since the high water mark of 2012 with 91,526 views, I knew that I needed to dig into the site and improve findability of the content for visitors once they land on the site usually from Google and other search engines. The idea behind this is that I have lots of overlapping and related content that might be useful for some visitors. While a search engine points a visitor to one particular post, the visitor might not realize there is related content that they might find useful. So, I want to help surface some of that other info and help visitors use navigation tools built into the site to help them find related content on their own.

The easiest change that I made to my WordPress settings was to enable “Show related content after posts,” which automagically give three related post previews at the bottom of a post’s page and show how it might be related (e.g., via the same category or tag).

The heavier lifts involved sorting tags by how many posts use them, identifying adjacent/overlapping tags, and consolidating those tags across affected posts. This less granular approach to tags makes it easier to find related content and it significantly reduced how many tags my site uses now. It’s more logical and less scattershot. I got the tags down to only 177. The tags appearing on the most posts are listed on the right in the tag cloud widget.

Similarly, I reduced the number of categories and made sure posts were assigned the appropriate ones. There are now 31 categories. All of these categories are listed on in the category cloud on the left–the size of each is determined by the number of posts categorized each way. I haven’t completed this for categories and tags, but it is something that I can work at over time–improving content associations over time.

Another problem identified with the help of Google Search Console was the number of pages that it wouldn’t index due to having dead video links–dead links to YouTube content. This required a little more work to hunt down those pages, but I deleted the dead links and added an update on those pages that the content either no longer existed or was removed due to copyright issues.

While I was digging through those pages with dead video links, it made me reconsider keeping all posts as some of those posts were only links to videos/embedded video. I decided to delete those pages that were only video-focused without any commentary or very little commentary on my part.

Also, I began thinking about posts for long defunct call for papers and application notifications. When I originally started my blog, I envisioned it being a hub for SF Studies info, but it was impractical for me to attempt to keep up and share out CFPs and announcements. It was hard enough posting about the work that I was doing while doing everything else–studying, teaching, working, etc. Since I didn’t reach the level of re-sharing that I had hoped to but there was a significant amount of this kind of content, I decided to delete those posts as they weren’t strongly related to my work and there’s no requirement on the part of my blog to be a historical record of those things. Furthermore, the less relevant posts won’t accidentally surface as a related post on the content that I actually want to help visitors find. Between the defunct video posts and CFPs/announcements, I culled 79 posts leaving 1,543.

One thing that I’m opting not to do is re-enable comments. While I allowing visitors an option to comment on posts and pages to build engagement, it has in my experience been more focused on criticism, negativity, and spam. I give my email in the about widget on the right, so folks are free to contact me that way. Since I instituted that years ago, I can count the number of emails that I’ve received from visitors on one hand, so it seems to be a high enough bar that saves me from dealing with comments that I don’t want to police. Also, it keeps the site focused on the content that I want to publish.

I’ll keep working to improve the overall operation of the site so that it has as much utility for its visitors.

Mike Flynn (1947-2023)

Mike Flynn delivers the keynote address at the 2019 City Tech Science Fiction Symposium to a rapt audience.

When you put together an event like a symposium or conference, you need a keynote speaker who can anchor it, pull together its various threads, and share their reputation to elevate the event for the benefit of the audience and participants. Mike Flynn, the author of Eifelheim and “The Forest of Time,” graciously agreed to be all that by closing out the Fourth Annual City Tech Science Fiction Symposium in 2019 that celebrated Astounding/Analog‘s 90th anniversary. He passed away at the end of September. Locus remembers him here, and his family started this thread of memories on Facebook. You can watch his touching keynote address below.

Patricia Warrick (1925-2023)

Windup Robot photo on the cover of Patricia Warrick's The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction

While doing research for my sabbatical project, I discovered that Patricia Warrick had passed away on 23 Feb. 2023. She was 98 years old.

I never met her, but her work has had a profound influence on my professional development and thinking throughout my academic career.

As an undergraduate at Georgia Tech, her words guided my first research project on artificial intelligence for the Sci Fi Lab in 2004, supported my presentation on robots for the Monstrous Bodies Symposium in early 2005, and provided a model for my senior thesis on networks of SF and technology during the Cold War in late 2005.

When I left to spend a year overseas as the University of Liverpool earning my MA, my annotated copy of Warrick’s The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction (1980) is one of the books that I brought with me. And, I’m glad that I did, because returning to it helped my thinking while writing my MA thesis on Cold War and post-Cold War identities reflected in the original and re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series.

And when I was earning my PhD at Kent State University, I turned to Warrick’s work again. First, her Cybernetic Imagination and Mind in Motion: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick (1987) both proved helpful in my semiotics seminar paper on deconstructing the human/robot dichotomy in the works of Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick in 2007, three iterations of a paper (here, here, and here) on images of women in Dick’s Ubik (1969). And, her ideas helped me through my PhD exam on Philip K. Dick and my dissertation Brains, Minds, and Computers in Literary and Science Fiction Neuronarratives, which includes a chapter on Dick’s work.

When I first read Warrick’s The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction, I thought to myself that I want to write a book like that. Her writing and thinking have been and continue to be a guide for me. The book project that I am currently working on is very much modeled on her work. When it is done, she will certainly be a part of it.

Photo of SFRA Executive Committee by Elizabeth Anne Hull from Locus, Sept 1985. Pictured second from left, Patricia Warrick was the immediate past president.

September 2023 Updates to the Generative AI and Pedagogy Bibliography Page

An anthropomorphic cat dressed like a professor in a tweed jacket, sitting at a desk with papers in front of him. Shelves of books behind him. Image created with Stable Diffusion.

Since posting the original version of my Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Pedagogy Bibliography and Resource List in April 2023, I have continued to add resources that I find through my research and daily online reading. I’ve added 61 articles and books to the bibliography since August 2023 for a total of 382 MLA-formatted references. Also, it has 55 online groups and resources linked at the bottom. Whenever you access the bibliography, you can check the bottom of the page to see if I’ve recently updated it–I always add the date for any updates.

I hope that the bibliography might be useful to you! If there’s something that my bibliography is missing, send me an email (details in the “Who is Dynamic Subspace” widget to the right) or connect with me on social media (links on my About page).