ALERT it’s complicated: Church Ladies book + WordPress + Podcast

Subscribe, listen to, and share Happiness Between Tails Podcast on most any platform; from Spotify and Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts and Breaker, to Pocket Casts and RadioPublic and Castbox, plus many more and an RSS feed. The full list of 50+ places is H-E-R-E.

WARNING: humanity and life are massively complex — even more so than WordPress (and more than my books that I’m querying agents about, which you can find out about here).

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw, my latest fave short story collection, underscores my point spectacularly.

My review of it for Goodreads and Amazon:

A week later, I’m still reeling by how deftly Deesha traverses our weird, weird selves, in ways that anyone with a skin color and a beating heart can relate to. The church ladies who populate her short stories are neither good nor bad — they’re a seesaw of both and a rainbow of in between. Try illustrating human nuance in a way that’s all at once sexy and sad, entertaining and confusing, and above all else, thought-provoking. These are fiction, but you could have fooled me. As if that weren’t nirvana enough, audiobook narrator Janina Edwards (who graced us with this guest blog post), layers on her extra amazing-ness.

As for WordPress’s complicatedness, if you’re a fellow blogger, does it rankle you the way it does me that for all the love-labor posting demands, few people read older ones? Fret no more. There are a host of ways to fix that. They’re kinda naughty, but the good sort of bad.

Re-cycling, re-purposing, re-publishing = Re-yay! Re-yay! Re-yay!  Like most things internet-wise, multiple ways exist to conquer the same dang aim.

These are some of the methods to get new eyes on old posts without losing the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) traction they’ve earned. Likes, comments, and others people’s reblogs and links to your post remain intact:

1. Discuss an older post in a new one and add a link, like how I’m doing with here with an earlier one about blogging tips.

2. Update the post’s publish date. Schedule it for a few minutes or later into the future. Beforehand, feel free to revise the content to your heart’s content.

3. To duck your old post out of sight for however long you want, without losing all the SEO goodness it’s racked up, you can trash it. Once it’s in your trash, hover under the title and select ‘restore.’ Now it’s converted into a draft. Once in your drafts folder, update it as you please. Make sure you revise the publish date to a few minutes or more into the future. Now it’ll publish anew and show at the top of your posts list.

More ways to improve your site:

A) Ask someone to check it out while you silently observe how they use it. After a few minutes, give them an assignment, such as to search your posts by topic. Take a deep breath when you discover that they’re totally lost or do the exact opposite of what you expect.

B) Take a gander at how your site looks on other types of devices, including your friends’ other brands of smartphones, tablets, and desktop monitors. If it doesn’t look wonderful on all, WordPress has many free themes that are easy to convert to.

C) New visitors feel more comfortable at a site where they know what they’re getting into. An additional line of explanation under your blog’s title can help orient them.

When in doubt, WordPress’s online chat and email assistance serves me well: Wordpress.com/Help 

Hint: Beforehand, save yourself misunderstanding, aggravation, and time by taking screenshots of problems, then load them into your media library, to show the WordPress rep. While interacting with you, they can look at your site, but won’t screenshare, at least not on the cheapest of plans I’m on.

Do you have tips or trouble with using WordPress?