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'Digital Dispatch'
Welcome to the MCC blog!
Keywords:
resolution, website, articles, reviews, clients
Key Takeaway:
This is where I’ll be posting shorter
updates, comments, and rants that don’t really fit anywhere else on the website.
Category Insights:
ANNOUNCEMENT — This article shares an update, change, or important
announcement.
Purpose
This is where I’ll be posting shorter updates, comments, and rants that
don’t really fit anywhere else on the website. For now, I’m calling it the "Digital
Dispatch," though the name might change if I come up with something better. The website
design will continue to evolve. I am always looking for ways to better manage the
website and add new features.
If there’s a particular topic you’d like me to cover, feel free to reach out! I’m always
open to fresh ideas. At least half of the article ideas have come from clients who ask
questions.
Recent changes to main website:
- TOTAL REWRITE! - The entire site has been rewritten to remove older code and to modernize the site. This has resulted in major performance improvements and visual enhancements.
- Homepage optimization - The total number of bytes was reduced by more than half.
- The original template was completely replaced with a new custom design, optimized for performance.
- Eliminated Bootstrap and JQuery libraries
- The MCC home page now renders in 1.2 seconds!
- Updated the content security policy to make the website much more secure.
- Logo change! The website fits cellphones and tablets better.
- Restored the broken functionality of top banner.
- Added outline around title text for better visibility.
- Fixed Google map sizing when viewed on cellphones.
- Created a new button system for entire site
- Graphic enhancements everywhere
- Random spelling & grammar mistakes are being fixed as they are discovered.
- In page links didn't always land in the correct spot on the home page, services page and networks page. We think these are all fixed.
- The reviews directory has been removed from the home page as it was getting to long. It now has its own page.
Recent blog section changes:
- Correct issues on selected pages that caused the navigation menu to extend past the right of the screen.
- Improved loading speed of blog pages
- Changed to a slightly larger font for all blog articles and the directory.
- Added a master directory page.
- Articles are now listed by category and by number.
- Search function on the blog directory page.
- Blog articles were moved to individual pages for clarity.
- Article reordering
- Deprecated the old multi-article pages. They were too much work to maintain and terrible for SEO.
- Created new section 'Pinned and Frequently Asked Questions'.
- Additional cross reference links between articles
- Added at least 1 image to every article
- Added credits to most photos
- Removed unintentional/unwanted border on all blog pages caused by a CSS error.
Technology stack used on this website:
- Hosting: Linux based Apache
- Theme: Self created
- HTML 5 / CSS 3
- XML (sitemap is auto generated via python script)
- Java Script
- Python (blog CMS, breadcrumbs,keyword analysis, and summary box generation)
- BeautifulSoup (website scraping tool for blog summary generation)
- JSON (schema)
- VSCode with 30+ extensions
- Chat GPT (writing, vibe coding, images)
- CoPilot (writing, vibe coding, images)
- Gemini (writing, vibe coding, images)
- Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) / Ubuntu
- Gemma 2:9b local AI running on WSL / Ubuntu
- Microsoft Excel (data analysis)
- Multiple website quality auditing tools (10+)
- Website is heavily documented
In-House Content Management System
We have developed our own homebrew content management system (CMS). This continues to be a FUN project. It's being written in Python with some additional libraries. We even created it to have its own GUI. It's still a bit rough at this point but its already creating a positive impact on our Google results. The goal was to use it to make sure all website pages are consistently in the same, proper format while meeting SEO requirements for Google and other search engines. Features include:
- Keyword Analysis - Examine each page for keywords and suggest additional keywords.
- Weak Page Analysis - Use a local AI to generate reports to identify stale pages content and suggest opportunities for improvement.
- Sitemap Generation - Creates an up to date sitemap.xml file
- Schema Generation - Generate the proper breadcrumb schema for every page.
- Summary Box Generation - Creates a summary box for each blog page article.
- Page Description Check - Check page description and offer better ideas using local AI. Change meta tags as required.
- Additional features are still being added.
Display Testing:
The homepage text now displays correctly for nearly all mobile, tablet, laptop and desktop size screens with Chromium based browsers.
- 2960x1440 Resolution
- 2560x1440 Resolution
- 1920x1200 Resolution
- 1600x900 Resolution
- 1440x900 Resolution
- 1366x768 Resolution
- 1280x1000 Resolution
- 1024x768 Resolution
- 848x480 Resolution
- 800x600 Resolution
- Kindle HD10 1920x1200 Resolution
- Samsung GS9+ 2280x1080 Resolution
- Samsung GS24+ 2340x1080 Resolution
Reviews
If you haven't done so already, please check out our product reviews! We
started making mini reviews of products we have either used ourselves or have
implemented for clients. The reviews are NOT sponsored, and items were acquired with our
own money. They are intended to reflect our actual experience. We'll let you know if it
was easy or difficult to use or if it met our needs. The reviews are often Last Updated
to reflect any new experience or problem we may discover along the way.
REVIEW
PAGE
Planned website additions:
- There are ideas for many more articles which will be added as time allows.
- Update and expand all articles as necessary (ongoing process).
- The addition of guest articles. Who's interested?
- Addition of a blog comment section.
- Ability to take customer payments from the website.