What Did You Do On The Blog Today, DrHGuy?
A: Well, anonymous, ephemeral, and incredibly convenient interrogator, my blogging time today was filled with housekeeping chores.
Consequently, today’s post is also about housekeeping chores.
Now you’re excited, eh?
But wait, there’s more.
The housekeeping in the spotlight, you see, deals with cleaning up the mess caused by a conflict, embedded within the core coding of two web-based programs, between how those systems manage certain punctuation marks.
Quickens the pulse, doesn’t it?
Get Smart (Quotes) Or Get Found - Choose One
The developers of WordPress, the software that produces these posts, apparently decided that it would be way cool if the plain ol’ dumb, straight quotation marks and apostrophes keyboarded into the WordPress editor were magically transformed into fancy-schmancy, smart, curly quotation marks and apostrophes.
Readers who wish to compare and contrast these two styles may consider the following illustration.
My own subjective assessment is that the so-called smart quotes look a tad niftier, but not so much niftier that I would mourn their loss. And, others may prefer the less rococo, straight version, leading to the query, …
A: Once again, strange but handy questioner, you bring up the pertinent issue at exactly the right time. It’s no big deal - unless one expects Google to locate that post.
Google Don’t Need No Stinking Curly Quotes
Google likes straight quotes,1 and, moreover, Google really doesn’t care for smart quotes. I know this because when I tried to find a Heck Of A Guy post I’d written about the Leonard Cohen song, Elvis's Rolls Royce, Google couldn’t - or wouldn’t - find it.
A bit of pondering and a quick search revealed the tripartite problem:
- WordPress produces smart quotation marks and apostrophes
- Google does not index smart quotation marks and apostrophes usefully
- Elvis's Rolls Royce, one notes, includes an apostrophe
My immediate problem was how to indicate Elvis's Rolls Royce without the apostrophe. After a moment’s consideration, however - things got worse.
How many quotations and apostrophes, I wondered, were contained in the Heck Of A Guy’s 926 posts and 80 pages?
I’ll tell you how many - a lot, that’s how many.
And Google was disgusted with every one of them.
However Did You Solve This Conundrum, DrHGuy?
Once again, commodious one, you show great wisdom in your question.
There are a few workarounds, all of which are flawed. One can, for example, change the code in certain php files to turn off the straight-to-smart option. Of course, this would involve changing the DNA of the blog based on what worked for someone else.2 This re-coding could well fix the problem - or mutate my two years of blog into a collection of unintelligible symbols. And, the fix would have to be repeated with every update of those php files.3
Or, on a punctuation mark by punctuation mark basis, one can insert the HTML code for the punctuation mark. The HTML code is invulnerable to WordPress transformations. All one has to do it find every apostrophe and replace it with four symbols placed consecutively: an ampersand followed by a pound sign followed by 39 followed by a semicolon.
Finding every apostrophe and quotation mark in every post not being my notion of a fun day (or, more accurately, a fun week), I opted to cleanse only the post titles of the problematic punctuation because Google weights titles as disproportionately important.
Heck, of the 926 post titles, no more than 150 (200 tops) contained the pertinent punctuation. In each of those I substituted code for the apostrophe or quote or, in perhaps a third of the cases, changed to wording to eliminate the need for quotes or apostrophes.
Yep, just another day of blogging glamor.
Footnotes
