My loyal website fans (myself and my wife when I ask her) have likely noticed the utter dearth of new content on The Surly Curmudgeon over the previous year.

Hard at Work – Just Not Creating Content

I have been hard at work over the last several months completely overhauling our church website – Mt Freedom Baptist Church – and then making some major changes to The Surly Curmudgeon. Many of these changes are under the hood. For example, I changed the BriBlog and Bible Study archive pages to take advantage of the new Generate Blocks v2.0 Query Block in place of the GridBuilderWP query grid. I think the look of the new archive pages is cleaner and will be more maintainable going forward. Speaking of maintainability, another under-the-hood change that won’t be obvious to website visitors is implementing almost all of the content as Generate Press elements – page headers and footers, archive page templates, search results template, page heroes, etc.

Improved Search

Another major change is that I bit the bullet and bought a lifetime license for the excellent Relevansi search plugin. This plugin allows visitors to search the contents of embedded PDFs in my Bible Studies and BriBlog posts. That’s a huge boon for visitors since the study notes for my more recent Bible Studies in particular are embedded inside PDFs. Previously, this content wasn’t searchable.

Admin and Site Enhancements

To make administration of the website easier, I installed the pro version of a plugin called Admin and Site Enhancements which includes a great collection of tools to make the job of administering and maintaining the website simpler and has the added benefit of collecting a number of useful tools formerly provided by individual plugins together under one umbrella. Most WordPress site admins will agree that eliminating plugins has security and performance advantages and significantly reduces (but unfortunately doesn’t eliminate altogether) the risk of plugins conflicting with one another.

Cloudflare

Another major change was putting the website onto the Cloudflare CDN instead of my hosting service native CDN which caused conflicts with my security plugin and broke my dynamic navigation menus. The Cloudflare CDN provides the site with better performance that will no doubt be quite noticeable to visitors, and has the added benefit of providing additional spam protection and other security functions. With a few minor tweaks, Cloudflare plays nicely with my website security and caching plugins. Cloudflare’s anti-spam capabilities allowed me to eliminate yet another plugin – Akismet – which is frankly getting a little long in the tooth and is now notorious for false positives and negatives.

Cloudflare’s Turnstile service allowed me to replace the clunky arithmetic question CAPTCHA with a humanity check for the login, contact, and subscription forms that’s effective with minimal visitor friction. Yes. Turnstile is there checking up on your humanity even though you don’t see it on any of The Surly Curmudgeon’s pages and forms.

While all of this was going on, I disabled the contact and subscription functions. I re-implemented the contact function after I got the new Cloudflare Turnstile CAPTCHA going along with Cloudflare’s native anti-spam capabilities.

Bye Bye Mailchimp – Hello Brevo

Lastly, I divorced The Surly Curmudgeon from Mailchimp in favor of Brevo. I needed an SMTP e-mail service because the free version my Easy WP SMTP plugin didn’t support Microsoft’s new OAuth requirements for e-mail senders. Since [email protected] is a Microsoft e-mail account targeted by the visitor contact form, I needed to have a mailer that would provide the OAuth that Microsoft now requires. My old SMTP plugin only provides that capability in its paid version. Brevo not only provides this transactional e-mail capability in the free version, but also provides the e-mail subscription and new curmudgeonliness notification functions (so-called “Email Marketing”) that The Surly Curmudgeon used to get from Mailchimp.

Brevo also provides the capability to send out new curmudgeonliness notifications via text messages to subscriber mobile phones. I’m still debating whether or not to implement that, because it isn’t a free service from Brevo and the cost of sending text messages varies largely by subscriber location relative to the good ol’ US of A that The Surly Curmudgeon calls home. The idea of text messaging is appealing because recipients are far more likely to open a read a text message than they are an e-mail.

Another capability that Brevo provides is allowing visitors to opt in to receive immediate (push) notifications of new curmudgeonliness by e-mail or text message as soon as it is posted. I need to cipher on that one as well, not only because of the potential text messaging expense, but also because I find push notifications particularly annoying except for important stuff like Amber alerts and tornado warnings. I made a conscious decision not to add pop-ups calling for visitors to subscribe after a specific time, scroll depth or so-called “exit intent.” Brevo provides this capability for free while my Popup Maker plugin only provides it as a “pro” version paid enhancement. I find it somewhat unnerving that some piece of software might be monitoring where my mouse is hovered looking for an opportunity to send me messages that I might very well consider spam. So for now, I’ve placed push notifications onto “the long bench” while I cipher on them.

There are also some cosmetic changes that will be apparent to website visitors. The color scheme has been changed. The menus have been simplified. The home page has been rearranged. The site’s page structure has been streamlined, and all the pages have been cleaned up to provide a simpler and more consistent look and feel.

The final piece of the puzzle was turning subscriptions back on, and implementing a weekly automatic new curmudgeonliness e-mail notification to The Surly Curmudgeon subscribers – all three of whom as I write this post are me at various email addresses.

This post is the first new content added to the website since I began the overhaul nearly a year ago. In fact, it’s the test balloon to see if the new automatic notifications by Brevo are working. Coming up, I look forward to getting back into posting my Bible Studies and occasional BriRants and other BriBlog content. I’ve got a lot of ciphering to do, but in the meantime, I really need to get back into creating some curmudgeonliness that some perverts somewhere might actually be interested in receiving notifications about, right?