Khrome.dev

In two short weeks since my last posting, I have at 50% more page views.

This bulk seems to be based on the same Google SEO traffic driver.

I don't know that I am going to see many more gains without additional articles. Time to write some new content, which is something I have been fairly lax about.

When I wrote my blog originally, I used Vue and Gridsome. It was great, I shipped the whole site in a few hours.

Late in the year I rewrote the site in Svelte and Sapper. I did this for personal reasons, to learn the technology. But shortly after I saw a massive boost in Google SEO.

I believe a lot of this had to do with my focus on Structured Content. When rebuilding the site, I added JSON+LD. I also worked to improve some of the wording across the site.

Now if I can just sit down and write another article. I have not added any new posts since July....

I wrote an article that was about 404 pages on Zeit.co and how to set them up. At the time it was undocumented and hard to find.

At the start of the article, I had a section about different 404 pages around the internet. A company reached out to me to ask if I would include there 404 page in the article.

I ended up splitting the article into two, one about different 404 pages, and another about specifically configuring Zeit.co.

https://khrome.dev/blog/creating-compelling-and-useful-404-pages

When I launched my blog, I only wrote 3 articles. I had seen some minor SEO traffic from launch on an article that was very niche, 404 pages on Zeit hosting. My other two articles saw no traffic. This continued from July to October.

At the end of October, everything changed. An article I wrote on Vue and Storybook Decorators took off overnight, going from 5 pageviews or so a month to over 500. Yep small numbers still, but it was a noticeable change.

My running theory is that I had launched a new version of the blog, where I rebuilt the technology stack. While making these changes, I doubled down on structured content. I spent a lot of time making sure I had valid JSON+LD.

Here is the article that took off -

https://khrome.dev/blog/custom-decorators-with-storybook-and-vue

This was originally done as a learning exercise.

I was upset with the bundle size for a simple Vue/Gridsome repo, and when comparing the same code to Svelte/Sapper, I saw an immediate benefit to reduce my bundle size.

I rebuild the entire site fairly easily. I moved from Vue to Svelte and changed some processes to align better with Sapper than Gridsome.

While the visual part of the site was very easy. The data processing was not, and took me a few weeks.

I decided to reproduce many features of Gridsome that I was using within Svelete so it would not be a step backward. This included having a GraphQL interface to the data parsed out of Markdown files.

The biggest benefit to this effort is I doubled down on improving the SEO of the page, specifically around Structured Content. I also improved the pagination work so each page would be static, instead of just SPA based.

Writing this from the future (12/12/19), the change was worth it for SEO. But I could have made similar edits on the Gridsome project. The new code is easier and faster to work with now that I have a lot of hurdles out of the way.

If it was not for the learning opportunity that helped my day job, I would not do this so soon after launching originally.

Testing the waters...

I discovered that HackerNoon has open submissions. SInce cross-posting to medium has not been working, I decided to look for other sources. I am already cross-posting to Dev.to, but the traffic is limited.

So far my success is as follows -

• Medium - 6 reads across two articles
• Dev.to - 500 reads across 3 articles, but nothing after a limited release.
• HackerNoon - pending approval of a single article

Does anyone else know a good development site for cross-posting and republishing content?

While I got the cross-posting working to Medium, using Zappier and RSS, the content came through in a fairly broken state. After fixing EVERY code block (technical coding blog), and relinking images, it failed to save correctly.

Bottom line, I spent another 45 minutes fixing the post. Which in turn failed to save. Looking at the stats of my first two posts, I don't feel that it is worth it. I have only had 5 totally reads so far on all posts. The new paywall that Medium has seems to have damaged the discovery they had a few years ago.

I decided that I would try and set up cross-posting with Medium. The goal was to not rewrite the article, and have whatever was written transmit correctly. Overall the connection was successful using Zappier Rss to Medium connector. The big issue now is that the first two articles got a total of 3 views. Medium maybe is not the holy grail they claim.

I wrote my first two articles this week. This will set my goal to write two articles per week to stay active. The first article was on making 404 pages within the Now v2 platform by Zeit. This was something that is largely undocumented. For my second article, I wrote about quirks with flexbox that is still present in some major browsers.

I realized over the weekend that I wanted to spend my time writing, and not on the creation of assets. In a effort to minimize the time it would take to write content, I started to build out the generator.

It took longer to generate images correctly, and get it deployed, than it did to build the blog. But now I can quickly generate decent looking images.

Bonus Points - I can change the styles, and improve the artwork over time, and have that cascade to all parts of the website.