Time to take a break of updating the site again before it gets boring. 12 Galleries of Mandelbulb 3D are online, not much changes elsewhere. The problems with Google seem to be related to the configuration of certain plugins and how the URLs are shown, which I think I’ve changed for better. The layout issues also were misconfigurations in some parts of the plugins and the main theme of the site. It’s still not getting any traffic, but it’s more than expected.

I got this message from Google saying it is not indexing some of my pages because of some technical error. OK, it can be fixed (I guess), but it’s not supposed to happen at all – a “NOINDEX” was added to the header of some pages and in my robots.txt but I didn’t do it. Then I went to check the site from outside the dashboard of the hosting company just to see if it was loading properly (if Google can’t index it, maybe there was a problem with the pages not loading), and it’s very broken. The background of the pages is now different than it should be (it’s white when it was supposed to be black), and a lot of the pages aren’t loading properly. Maybe there’s more than just that.

I am not going to rebuild all the galleries again, no way. I had problems with this gallery plugin in the past, and I have decided to keep it just because I didn’t want to rebuild all the galleries from scratch in another plugin. I suspect it might be due to the theme being updated, maybe it reverted some of the changes I did. What is strange is that when I load the page in the dashboard, it looks correct. When I load it from the browser in a new window outside the dashboard, it’s broken and everything seems wrong, all my previous settings are lost. It’s not a theme problem, it’s basically a plugin problem – again! Anyway, this is why I hate having a website nowadays, in the past editing was much more straightforward and it didn’t use to crash everything so easily. It’s incredibly boring to make everything ready thinking it is working and in fact it’s not, and it’s not your fault… Last time I had problems with this plugin they didn’t know what to do.

EDIT: I was thinking about a solution, after noticing that all the galleries and pages are very messed up. I might unpublish everything, fix the layout one by one then start publishing the galleries again. I think I know where most of the problems are and how to fix them.

The update to the Mandelbulb galleries is still far from being finished (about 120 images added so far, out of 450), but I’m also doing some extra fine tuning to the site in general while it’s being done, as I’ve noticed that the traffic is really low, or at least much lower than it once was. I know the site was really abandoned for a while but it should still be properly indexed by Google and others, and it’s not. I fixed some descriptions in the FracInt galleries (I will do the same to the other galleries), and I tried to start adding tags to the images to maybe help the so-called “SEO” of the site, but it seems that the tag system for the galleries is not the same as the system used for the site, so I can’t reuse the tags that already exist for the site and individual posts, they need to be recreated specifically for the gallery plugin. It’s not that hard, but it would be nice if it could reuse the already created tags.

I still don’t know what to do to improve the traffic to the site, but maybe because it just have images and not very much fractal-related material (links and tutorials, for example), it doesn’t have much that can make it stand out in a search engine. I know that there is an user on Instagram that uses the very same name as my site but we’re not related at all. The link to this Instagram profile appears higher than my own site on Google, go figure.

Sometimes I wonder if running a website that doesn’t deal with specific services in the category of the site, which is what might bring extra traffic and attention – if it’s an artistic site for example, selling your artwork is one service you can provide – is really worth the effort in this social media era. Personal pages or portfolio-like pages are not very interesting anymore it seems. Long gone are the days where you could go visit a page about a certain subject or person and find it interesting and with good or enough information beyond the basics. If I post an image on a fractal group on Facebook or in some other social media it probably will be much more noticed than if posted here, but that’s just an image loosen in the middle of a billion others. And also, maintaining a website is much more tedious and expensive… but I refuse to give up.