Getting this really huge World Travel web site up and running has taken a lot of effort! It seems the tiniest improvement from the viewer’s perspective requires hours of work. Today was dedicated to making a new web page come up when someone clicked on any one of the 4100+ potential clicks. That simple-seeming change required inserting a tiny bit of code (TARGET=”_blank” ) into the html text in the middle of the terms “<a title=” and “<a href=”. It is a simple task, but repeating it a huge number of times by hand would take many hours of mind numbing work, and would introduce lots of simple human errors. Therefore, I considered copying each of the 34 posts, pasting them into a word processor and then doing a global search and replace of each of the bits of code, and then pasting them back into the original document. That probably would have worked, but it still would have taken all day and probably more, and probably would have introduced some human error too.
Fortunately, Debbie’s search on the internet came up with a program which would do that directly on my preexisting WordPress document without having to cut and paste the 34 pages individually into a word processor. We used a plugin called Search Regex. It was all straightforward and worked just fine, except for one small thing. My site was too big. That little problem required letting the program run several times, biting off chunks of a size it could handle. Also, it needed to run several times to clear up the alternate variations in code I had used when writing the original documents. It is possible there are a few variations still lurking in the html. The code works perfectly for viewing, but it might not bring up the new site being accessed in a new window. The only problem with that is that the viewer is tempted to move away from my site and never return. Since I have exerted this huge amount of effort to create the World Heritage Links site, I want people to use it. And, I want them to purchase the various items which will be presented along with the fabulous things I am giving them for free.
Tomorrow I will show this site to the WordPress MeetUp group for their critique and suggestions. They have been very helpful in offering things which would improve it, and in encouraging me to persevere. It has been a mighty struggle. I suspect that this site would qualify as an example of Thomas Edison’s often quoted saying, “Invention is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”
I hope I have the good sense to comprehend other people’s criticisms of my work.