Tag Archives: WordPress

To Infinity and Beyond: The Future of Spilling the Royaltea

After twelve weeks of non-stop posting, PUB 101 has come to an end. But that doesn’t mean that Spilling the Royaltea has run out of potential, so here’s the plan for what’s to come.

To the Future

Over the course of these twelve weeks, I’ve really developed a love for blogging. I get to write about things that interest me without having to worry whether it would work well for an essay or whether it would be enough to get me a good grade. And having the opportunity to do things that I’d never get to do in other academic contexts, like using slang, or contractions, or starting my sentences with “so” and “and” has been so refreshing. I get the space to publish my own thoughts without thinking about what my prof will think with every word I write. So for all the above reasons and many more, I will be continuing with Spilling the Royaltea after the end of PUB 101.

In continuing my writing process, I’ll definitely keep writing posts for my hot takes, ranked, and news categories. In particular, the news category will have tons to talk about in the coming weeks, with King Charles’s coronation coming up in May. All in all, I’ll keep challenging my audience to think differently about issues and not always take for granted what they read or hear in the mainstream. And if they want light and fluffy, they’ll still have that too in the form of the “ranked” category and “Fashion, FAST!” segment.

I also want to bring back my “the chronicles of Harry and Meghan” category. Since I won’t be taking any courses in the summer, I’ll have plenty of time to watch the documentary and read the memoir, and I’m sure I’ll have lots to say about both.

And I might even create a few new categories too, like a “hot topics” category. I’ve noticed that when writing my hot takes, there are some things that I haven’t really made a final decision on, like whether the monarchy should be abolished and whether we should be worried that Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis will end up like Prince Harry. So maybe in this section, I could discuss both sides of the argument and invite readers to weigh in too.

Even More Web Design Improvements

Of course, I still want to work on my website design skills. I might even take off the training wheels and redesign Spilling the Royaltea without a template, like Gertz suggests. Now that I know the basics of WordPress, I think it’s time to branch off and try to do things my own way instead. There are still a bunch of elements I’d like to change, but my template is preventing me from actually making these changes.

For example, when readers click on one of the categories on the menu bar, I want them to see little previews of several different posts instead of the big featured image being the first thing they see. I also never got around to making a logo, which I think is one of the most important parts of website branding. So I will definitely get to that too.

Example from "melatonin gone missing" of the post previews I would like to include on my website. Features short previews of each post with a small featured image.
Example from “melatonin-gone-missing.com” of the post previews I would like to include on my website

Overall, these changes will culminate in realizing the ultimate potential of my personal cyberinfrastructure, which will represent me and me only. And, since the site will no longer feature PUB 101 content, I can focus solely on royal family content. I might even consider archiving the PUB 101 section and making my site a fully-functioning royal family gossip site with no affiliations to SFU.

Community Guidelines

I also hope that in my future content, people start interacting more with my content, so with this comes the responsibility of creating community guidelines to ensure that Spilling the Royaltea remains a safe and uplifting community for royal family followers.

The four pillars I’ve developed for Spilling the Royaltea include respect, tolerance, openness, and togetherness. These four aspects relate most strongly to the comment section, which can end up pretty nasty if not carefully regulated. Konnikova even writes that the magazine, Popular Science decided to ban comments because of the “culture of aggression and mockery” it can cause. So that’s why I want readers to be respectful of each other when commenting, tolerant of others’ opinions and ideas, open to listening to and learning from different perspectives, and feel a sense of togetherness and community for learning and sharing.

And to protect both myself from seeing any hate comments (which, thankfully, I haven’t received yet), I’ll be regulating my comment section from those “anonymous” users who think it’s so easy to hide behind a screen and comment mean things just because it’s harder to identify them, like Konnikova describes. I’ll approve of comments as they come, and hopefully, this will keep things safe, inclusive, and welcoming on Spilling the Royaltea, which is all I could ask for as a website owner.

Here’s to the last process post and to a new chapter of Spilling the Royaltea. Olivia, signing out.

References:

Campbell, G. (2009). A personal cyberinfrastructure. EDUCAUSE Review, 44(5), 58. https://er.educause.edu/articles/2009/9/a-personal-cyberinfrastructure

Gertz, T. (2015, July 10). How to sur­vive the dig­i­tal apocalypse. Louder Than Ten. https://louderthanten.com/coax/design-machines

Konnikova, M. (2013). The psychology of online comments. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-psychology-of-online-comments

Wong, O. (2023). Hot takes. Spilling the Royaltea. http://spilling-the-royaltea.com/category/hot-takes/

Wong, O. (2023). Ranked. Spilling the Royaltea. http://spilling-the-royaltea.com/category/ranked/

Wong, O. (2023). News. Spilling the Royaltea. http://spilling-the-royaltea.com/category/news/

Photo:

Disney. (n.d.). [Buzz Lightyear] [Image]. https://wegotthiscovered.com/movies/is-buzz-lightyear-named-after-buzz-aldrin/

Blog Design Part 4: Summing it Up

Spilling the Royaltea has gone through quite the journey throughout eleven weeks of consistent posting. As my process posts come to an end, it’s time for one last blog design update as the fourth and final installment of the blog design process post series.

Additions and Deletions

At Spilling the Royaltea’s inception, I created a category called “the chronicles of Harry and Meghan” with the hopes of writing documentary and book reviews. At this time, Prince Harry’s book, which took the media by storm had just been released, and Harry and Meghan’s Netflix documentary had come out just a few months prior. They were a huge topic of discussion all over the news, social media, and just about everywhere else, and this was basically my motivation for creating the blog.

However, as the semester went on, I found it extremely difficult to get documentary episodes in, or find the time to sit down with a book that wasn’t an academic journal or textbook. Therefore, as the other categories started filling up, “the chronicles of Harry and Meghan” stayed empty for over half the semester.

Because I didn’t see myself having the time to watch the documentary or read the book, I decided to switch this category to a “ranked” one. The ranked category is exactly how it sounds: it ranks all things related to the royal family. I created this section because sometimes, I need to be shallow and fluffy. My “hot takes” and “news” sections are usually more critical and thought-provoking in nature. They involve topics like racism, sexism, sexual assault, and much more. While these topics are what I want to shine a light on the most, many royal family followers (including myself) enjoy some lighthearted material from time to time.

Preview of blog post in "ranked" section, called "Fashion, FAST! Kate Middleton's 5 Best Outfits of 2023 So Far"
Preview of a blog post in my new “ranked” section

Therefore, this “ranked” category discusses some other things that weigh a little lighter on readers’ chests, like fashion, or Prince Louis’s antics, or even just an informative post on the late Queen’s grandchildren, who always steal the spotlight at any event featuring the royals. It also includes a Fashion, FAST! segment, which featured quick hot takes on royal fashion decisions.

I felt a little disappointed that I was unable to watch the documentary or read the memoir, especially because these two pieces were the main motivators in the creation of my blog. But at the end of the day, Spilling the Royaltea as a digital garden is supposed to represent me and my interests. This means that I have the room to make changes when things don’t work and learn new things from these changes. So creating the “ranked” category to add a different perspective on the site wasn’t a bad thing at all. It just allowed me to share another side of myself with my audience and it worked out pretty well, in my opinion.

Consistencies

Aside from “the chronicles of Harry and Meghan” which turned into “ranked,” the other sections on Spilling the Royaltea stayed the same. “Hot takes” provided opinion pieces that aren’t really broadcast in the mainstream, like the fact that Princess Charlotte has all the characteristics to become the future Queen, or the fact that the royal family is a racist institution that needs to do better. Further, “news” followed the things that were in the mainstream, but provided critical takes on it, like the fact that royal titles recently changed for a bunch of royal family members, but not Lady Louise due to sexist, patriarchal protocols. 

And of course, my predetermined PUB 101 content and categories remained pretty much the same throughout the semester, with the simple addition of the “essay” sub-category, for, well, my essay.

Revisiting my Audience

At the beginning of my blogging journey, I imagined my audience and wrote content directed to it, as suggested by Hollenbaugh. I envisioned my audience as royal family followers. These were not necessarily people who loved them, but also included the people who love to hate them.

This meant that I was going to try to write content that didn’t purposefully portray a pro- or anti-royal family stance. Instead, I was just going to try to write about my own opinions, and I don’t think this could be even more true after eleven weeks.

The most important thing for me when writing my blog was making sure I didn’t become the right-wing, conservative Daily Mail, who endlessly supports the royal family and endlessly hates Meghan. So I included some more Daily Mail-type content, like the fact that Archie and Lilibet shouldn’t use royal titles, but not because I just wanted to hate on Meghan. I actually thought they shouldn’t use their royal titles. But I also included some pro-Harry and Meghan content, like my second mini assignment, written from the perspective of Princess Diana, who defends Harry and Meghan’s decision to step back from the monarchy.

Excerpt of blog post "Piping Hot Take: Archie and Lilibet Shouldn't Use Royal Titles"
Excerpt of my blog post, “Piping Hot Take: Archie and Lilibet Shouldn’t Use Royal Titles” which takes a critical stance against Prince Harry and Meghan
Excerpt of blog post "Mini Assignment 2: Love, Princess Diana - Messages from Heaven"
Excerpt of “Mini Assignment 2: Love, Princess Diana – Messages from Heaven” which supports Prince Harry and Meghan’s decision to step back from royal duties

The Future of Spilling the Royaltea: Transmedia Integration?

This week, we learned about transmedia integration, or repurposing our blog content for multiple platforms. Renniger explains that certain social networking sites are especially suited toward addressing counterpublics. Aspects of certain platforms help communicate messages that deviate from the mainstream, or the dominant “public.”

Spilling the Royaltea could be considered a counterpublic of royal family followers who are more objective (i.e. both critical and supportive) in their stance, which is a pretty uncommon thing. Therefore, I could move more of my content on TikTok, where small creators with minimal reach can most easily become popular. I could make videos using small segments and keywords from my articles and create slideshow-type TikToks, which help tell a story. Or I could narrate stories while pictures and videos show up behind me using the green-screen effect.

I could also move to Twitter and post short previews of my posts, and then link my blog so that readers could learn more. Or I could create longer-form versions of my TikToks and post them on YouTube, or even post my TikToks on YouTube shorts. The possibilities are endless.

References:

Basu, T. (2020, September 5). Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/03/1007716/digital-gardens-let-you-cultivate-your-own-little-bit-of-the-internet/

Hollenbaugh, E. E. (2021). Self-presentation in social media: Review and research opportunities. Review of Communication Research, 9, 80–98. https://doi.org/10.12840/ISSN.2255-4165.027

Renninger, B. J. (2015). “Where I can be myself … where I can speak my mind” : Networked counterpublics in a polymedia environment. New Media & Society, 17(9), 1513–1529. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814530095

Wong, O. (2023). Essay. Spilling the Royaltea. http://spilling-the-royaltea.com/category/essay/

Wong, O. (2023). Hot takes. Spilling the Royaltea. http://spilling-the-royaltea.com/category/hot-takes/

Wong, O. (2023). Love, Princess Diana – Messages from heaven. Spilling the Royaltea. http://spilling-the-royaltea.com/pub-101/mini-assignment-2-love-princess-diana-messages-from-heaven/

Wong, O. (2023). Piping hot take: Archie and Lilibet shouldn’t use royal titles. Spilling the Royaltea. http://spilling-the-royaltea.com/hot-takes/piping-hot-take-archie-and-lilibet-shouldnt-use-royal-titles/

Wong, O. (2023). Ranked. Spilling the Royaltea. http://spilling-the-royaltea.com/category/ranked/

Wong, O. (2023). News. Spilling the Royaltea. http://spilling-the-royaltea.com/category/news/

Analytics Part 2: Taking a Closer Look

This week, we learned all about how to optimize our blogs for every website’s best friend and greatest enemy: Google. So I decided to look closer at Spilling the Royaltea’s analytics to see who is visiting my site. Then, I did the same to my search engine optimization or SEO to try to figure out how to grow my audience and rank higher on Google searches. (For an explanation of the random underlines, read further):

Diving into Analytics

This week, I did a deep dive into Google Analytics for my website, and looked at who’s been looking at Spilling the Royaltea. Here’s what I found in terms of website traffic:

Screenshot of Google Analytics for Spilling the Royaltea (all relevant information is stated in the text of the blog)

Since Spilling the Royaltea’s inception, there have been exactly 100 new users and 745 page views! The number of users has stayed pretty consistent over time, with the occasional peak of 5 users a day. While it’s good to know that I haven’t been losing viewers, it would be nice to see this increase sometime soon. Hopefully, by improving my SEO in the coming weeks, I’ll see an improvement shortly.

Unfortunately, since I just recently enabled the option to view demographics, I am unable to see data on this section of my website analytics. Seeing my audience’s demographics would be extremely useful when ensuring I’m catering my data to the right people. For example, I am currently assuming that my audience consists mostly of young people, so I’m using quite a bit of Gen Z jargon in my content posts. But if mostly older people are looking at my blog, I’d have a little bit of a problem, since they might not understand the nuances of the language I’m using. When this part of Google Analytics updates, I’ll be sure to use it to help decide my content.

Implementing Effective SEO

Hollingsworth really drives home the importance of implementing SEO in businesses (and I guess Spilling the Royaltea could be considered one?) to help increase visitors to websites. For example, it builds trust and credibility. By creating an accessible, effective user experience that can be easily found on Google, people feel more comfortable going to my site for information. I’ll also get a larger audience by building this sense of trust and credibility. It even helps me with my knowledge of the web because I need to stay updated about who’s doing what to improve their SEO.

And in this week’s lecture, we learned exactly how we might go about improving our SEO, so I tried out a few of these tactics this week. Firstly, we learned about implementing effective keywords. These keywords are what searchers enter into Google, so I need to make sure I’m implementing enough of these to improve my ranking on Google searches. So for this process post, with the help of ChatGPT, I entered the prompt: Generate keywords for a blog post related to analytics and SEO, and here’s what it gave me:

Screenshot of keywords for my blog post about analytics and SEO generated by ChatGPT

And while I couldn’t include every single one of these keywords in my posts, I tried my best to organically include as many as I could (or slightly varied versions of them), the first occurrence of which I underlined throughout my post.

We also learned about including strategic headers. Although I thought I was already doing this pretty well, I learned about a few things I could do to further improve. For example, I should be using actionable headers, which I did for this post: I included the verbs “dive,” “implement,” and “create” to add some dimension and interest. I also included keywords in my headers, like “analytics” and “SEO.”

The final thing I want to do is work on the branding of my site. So far, although my website is consistent in its theme, nothing in terms of branding really makes it stand out and become memorable for visitors. I think that part of creating this “memorability” is making a logo. Coming soon…

Creating my Digital Garden?

But what about creating a digital garden just for me? In my previous process post about analytics, I spoke of maintaining my site as a digital garden instead of monetizing it and trying to grow my audience. Because of this, I concluded that I wouldn’t worry too much about gaining readers, just because I wanted to make it a space for just me and my own thoughts.

However, after learning about analytics and SEO this week, I realized that I’m already doing a bunch of the things I need to do to increase my audience like summarizing my article in the subheaders and writing high quality information. And after all, I realized that making a few improvements to potentially invite more people into my blog requires a few simple changes that don’t take away from the intimacy of my blog like I previously feared. So at the end of the day, having a big audience to share my interests with sounds like a pretty great thing to me.

References:

Basu, T. (2020, September 5). Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/03/1007716/digital-gardens-let-you-cultivate-your-own-little-bit-of-the-internet/

Hollingsworth, S. (2018, April 13). 12 reasons why your business absolutely needs SEO. Search Engine Journal. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/why-seo-is-important-for-business/248101/#close

Normann, S. (2023, March 21). Data and SEO [PowerPoint slides]. POSIEL. https://posiel.com/lecture-files/

Wong, O. (2023, March 19). Digital footprints, analytics, and monetization. Spilling the Royaltea. http://spilling-the-royaltea.com/process-posts/digital-footprints-analytics-and-monetization/

Photo:

The Fridge Agency. (n.d.). [SEO] [Stock Illustration]. https://thefridgeagency.com/blog/understanding-power-seo/

Digital Footprints, Analytics, and Monetization

Digital footprints, digital trails, and digital breadcrumbs – the data trails we leave behind us when we use technology are something many of us have been warned about our whole lives.

I Know A Lot About This

Like my previous post on digital literacy, I’ve learned quite a bit about digital footprints, especially as a Communication major. In one of my classes, I even produced a 10-minute documentary on the effects of digital footprints on future employment opportunities. But in that documentary, I emphasized individual actions and the implications of “cancel culture,” and how to mitigate the impacts of digital footprints on young people’s futures.

But on Pod Academy’s podcast, they explain that digital footprints don’t just encompass people’s individual actions and choices made on the internet. A lot of information is spread unintentionally when using any sort of technology with a chip in it. For example, when I use my phone, it’s constantly communicating with cell towers and the internet too. That means that my phone’s always giving apps information about me and my environment.   

And as an avid technology user, this is a little worrisome. I don’t exactly want my phone tracking me and giving all these apps tons of information at all times. But also, I’ve sort of gotten to a point where I don’t care. Like many others expressed on Pod Academy, the creation of our digital trails has been so ubiquitous that people simply don’t worry about it anymore.

Google Analytics

The information collected from our digital trails or footprints is often used to improve outreach and grow audiences. For example, for my own blog, I installed Google Analytics, which allows me to track people’s browsing habits on my website.

As of March 18, 2023, within the past 28 days, I’ve had 35 users visit my site. I can also see information about my most popular pages and top content, and how visitors experience my site such as how long pages take to load (which 9.4s, considered poor… oops). This information should help me build an audience and engage them effectively. However, to be completely honest, although I have been checking my Google Analytics from time to time out of curiosity, I haven’t been using it to help improve my site for my audience.

Screenshot of "traffic" for Google Analytics on Spilling the Royaltea, showing that there have 35 users in the past 28 days.
The “traffic” section in Google Analytics for Spilling the Royaltea

I think that a big reason why I haven’t been doing so is because my site is turning out to be more like a digital garden than a blog. Digital gardens, according to Basu, are spaces that do not focus on growing audiences and having huge viewerships. Instead, they focus on personal growth, which is exactly what Spilling the Royaltea has been about. As my blog has developed, although I do have a target audience in mind, I’m not too worried about growing my audience, getting famous and rich, or any of that kind of stuff.

For now, I’m using my analytics simply as a way to satisfy my curiosity about who’s looking at my blog. I’m really enjoying my blogging process and especially like the lack of pressure to gain huge audiences, so I think that’s what I’ll be doing for the time being.

To Monetize or Not To Monetize?

So, all of this leads to the question of whether I should monetize my site. With the whole concept of digital gardens in mind and the idea of creating a space for me and my thoughts, I don’t foresee monetizing Spilling the Royaltea anytime in the near future.

Based on my own experience with monetized sites, I felt like ads make websites feel distant, incohesive, or even disturbing, since many of the ads from Google Adsense are often inappropriate. I want my blog to be as inviting and welcoming to users as possible and I want it to retain its intimate, personal feel. I don’t want users to believe I’m “using them” by exploiting their information and digital trails to extract money from them. With my own apprehensions about advertising and data collection in mind, I don’t want to create a space where others feel the same kinds of fears.

I also want my blog to reflect me and my thoughts only and with a third party who imposes their ads or has input on what kinds of content I post, it takes away from the intimacy of my blog. For me, the content I post is what matters, and I want users to focus on this too.

So although Spilling the Royaltea is simply a passion project (…or a school project) without any financial gain, I’m very satisfied with how the experience has been so far. It’s the joy of blogging that matters, not how much money I can get from it.

References:

Basu, T. (2020, September 5). Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/03/1007716/digital-gardens-let-you-cultivate-your-own-little-bit-of-the-internet/

Pod Academy. (2016, May 3). Digital breadcrumbs: The data trail we leave behind us. http://podacademy.org/podcasts/digital-breadcrumbs-our-data-trail/

Wong, O. (2023, March 14). All About Digital Literacy. Spilling the Royaltea. http://spilling-the-royaltea.com/process-posts/all-about-digital-literacy/

Photo:

Lean Plum. (2019). [Monetization] [Stock Illustration]. https://www.leanplum.com/blog/free-app-monetization-methods/

Search Engine Optimization

In this week’s lecture, we’ve learned about search engine optimization and how it can help bring audiences to your website. Although talking about this concept this week, utilizing SEO to attract an audience had been always around to configure on Word Press. Moreover, utilizing the tags option to allow my website to show up at the top of Google searches is now one of my key goals in order to expand my website to a larger audience.

Before this week’s lecture, I didn’t realize the importance of using tags. I only added a few tags just for completion as I thought it was a requirement for the class. However, this is not true and can help my website to further grow.

As Genshin Impact is a popular game, I do not see that any of my posts show up in the search results. For example, if I try to search for a build for the character “Raiden Shogun” you will see multiple websites that are not mine but all with similar content. In fact, it does not show up even if I type “raiden shogun abysmal guide”. When searching for my website it only shows up at the bottom on the second search page. Discouraging, but this means that my website has a lot of room for improvement to reach out to a bigger audience.

An interesting result I got from one of my searches was when I searched for “absymal guides raiden” on Google. Instead of seeing my website show up in the search result, I found that the Posiel site was in the result.

search result on google of "absymal guides raiden"

This search result makes me wonder why my website does not show up first before Posiel. However, I will work towards changing this result so that I can have my website show up before Posiel.

With all things considered, having my website show up as one of the top search results on Google is something I’d want to achieve. However, considering the popularity of the game, I do understand that there will be a challenge. Nonetheless, it will not prevent me from working towards this goal.