Tech Blog

Here I'll be sharing insights from my professional experiences and studies in data science and web development. There'll be plenty of Wagtail, Django and Python, a bit of JavaScript and CSS thrown in, and more on data science & engineering. There might even be a bit of time for some project management and business analysis too.

I'll also provide insights into how this site was made, as well as code examples and thoughts on how those could be further developed.

Feel free to leave questions or comments at the bottom of each post - I just ask people to create an account to filter out the spammers. You won't receive any unsolicited communication or find your email sold to a marketing list.

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Showing blogs tagged with #seo

Making Wagtail pages more SEO friendly with Wagtail Metadata

Wagtail pages are great for creating a lot of rich content straight out of the box, but for SEO optimization, they need some tweaking.

Here, I subclass the Page model with some help from the wagtail-metadata plug-in.

This subclassed model becomes the base for all site pages and holds all the data for og metadata, twitter cards, page description etc..

2022-12-22 18:24:27 UTC

Open Wagtail Rich Text Block Links in a New Tab

You'd think this would be something you could do out of the box, but the makers of Wagtail have stated that this is against their philosophy and won't ever be implementing it. Here's a simple fix to circumvent that decision.

2021-09-09 11:59:19 UTC

Configuring a Dynamic Sitemap on Wagtail

A sitemap lists a website’s most important pages, making sure search engines can find and crawl them. It's important to keep your sitemap up to date for optimal SEO.

With a quick bit of coding, you can set your sitemap to be created dynamically on demand, ensuring it always reflects the latest content.

We'll go through adjusting the lastmod field, and add values for the changefreq and priority on site, class or page level.

I'll show you how to add support for xhtml alternate entries for multi-lingual sites using a custom view in place of the built-in Wagtail sitemap app.

Finally, I add a method to notify Google of updates automatically on page publish/delete.

2022-12-22 18:25:06 UTC

Configure Wagtail robots.txt and Block Search Indexing

Rather than just being a static file, you can use Django/Wagtail templating to create a dynamically generated robots.txt. This is not the place to block search engine crawlers though, I'll show a method to apply that from your base template.

2021-09-12 18:03:07 UTC

Improve Response Times and SSL Security on Your NGINX Web Server

NGINX is a lightweight and fast web server that meets the content delivery needs of most small to medium sites. Loading speed is now a crucial metric in how the search engines rank websites.

With a little basic configuration you can vastly improve the performance of your server and reduce delivery times. Here, I give an introduction to enabling HTTP/2, gzip compression and cache headers.

We'll also add a few changes to tighten SSL security with a stronger ciphers list, Strict Transport Security (HSTS) and add a CAA record to our DNS.

2022-12-22 16:49:22 UTC