It’s hard to believe that this is the 50th post on Camping Coder. Over the last few months, there has been an awful lot of rapid learning involved. Much of it caused by just not knowing, or at least thinking about certain things.
Our top 5 unknowns
While not the hottest topic in the world here are the top five things that were not expected when starting this blog.
1 - schema.org patterns
This one was probably the biggest unknown when starting Camping Coder. Before starting the blog, the thinking was simple - write code, publish code. While that is still the case the more important part is for people to be able to find your posts. That’s where schema.org comes in. Basically, there’s a bunch of hidden stuff on the pages that allow all the search engines to figure out what a particular page is about.
{
"@context": "http://schema.org",
"@type": "WebPage",
"breadcrumb": "Books > Literature & Fiction > Classics",
"mainEntity":{
"@type": "Book",
"author": "/author/something.html"
etc.....
It equates to something like this.. bla!
2 - Writing on a schedule
Aw - when we first starting Camping Coder the thought was easy. Write an interesting post and publish it, then do it often. While in theory that’s simple, making it a habit is a whole lot harder. For the first few posts it was easy, but then it started becoming harder to come up with an idea. To help with this we simply came up with a list of all the things that we really wanted to talk about and wrote them down. Now when writers block happens we can simply refer to the list and find a topic that meets our fancy at that time.
3 - Taking good pictures
In theory, all of our pictures were good before, but as you get into a campground review or other post, finding a picture becomes a little harder. This is especially true on the campground reviews because you only have the opportunity to take a good picture when you’re at the campground. For example, when we were at St Simons Island we lucked out with the picture below, but sometimes that’s not the case.
So now we make a point at looking for those interesting pictures while we’re out and touring with the camper.
4 - Hugo versions
If you read Running Hugo on Chromebook or any of the other Hugo related posts, then you probably can conclude that this blog is generated with Hugo. While this is an awesome platform / tool / workflow it’s not without its quirks. After six months of truly working with it, its versions, and its updates I’d say it was a good choice, but not without some pain.
Now that we’ve wrangled it and have a pretty good workflow, it’s actually hard to think of using any other platform. So much so, that the idea of converting other existing projects to it is being floated around.
5 - Back referencing
This is actually a really fun one, and not in the least expected, but we are always referencing Camping Coder for our past projects, camping sites, etc. We’ve even started looking at the Camping Review page’s map to give us the quick reference of where we’ve been and what we like. Since the ratings are broken down into items that are important to us, it really helps jog the memory on whether we like one place more than the other.
Overall
It’s been an exciting 50 first posts, we’ve learned a lot about writing, and the general web. We’re also looking forward to hitting that 100 number. Hope you join us on the adventure!