Hello, it is December 1, 2023. It's December already, which is crazy. This is Temzee Video Vlog #3. I'm going to keep this one short and sweet because –I am tired, and I want it to be weekend (which it's kind of going to be after this, I have just a little bit more work).

UI Improvements and Bug Fixes

Since Monday, which was the last update, there has been some small UI improvements and bug fixes on the site. There were some issues with how the blog posts were spaced, word counts weren't showing up on the dashboard, what else... oh, the order of blog posts and the order of word counts was showing up in reverse order so I just had to go in and reverse those. Some of the titles on the notebooks on small screen widths were wrapping funny, and the header wasn't expanding to allow that so it was kind of overflowing outside of the header, so I had to fix that.

New Footer on Lessons

I also added a small footer at the bottom of each lesson notebook particularly for lessons that are inside of a course, so that a person can visit the previous lesson or next lesson easily. I did that because on mobile, the sidebar for navigation is not going to show up. So with that sidebar hidden, visitors need a way to get between the different lessons –so that's been added there.

Big Sitemap Improvements - Dynamic Sitemap Added

Also I made some big changes to the sitemap. The Google Search Console has not been indexing a lot of pages properly and I found out that since the refactor there are a lot of pages that weren't being included in the sitemap because some of those pages have switched to being rendered on the server-side (using server-side rendering). So the sitemap was only picking up pages that were statically generated before deployment, you know, when the site is built those pages get built –rather than on the fly when users visit them. So I added a second "dynamic" sitemap which will now capture the server-side rendered pages. I resubmitted that to Google and already search engine impressions have gone up quite a lot, and I hope to see a lot of those new pages indexed.

Fleshing out the Data Science Encyclopedia

Another thing that I've done is tried to make sure that there is at least one encyclopedia article for each letter of the alphabet, so that all of those pages would exist and be rendered. If there isn't at least one article for each letter than the letter page doesn't show up –doesn't ever get generated. So I've got that in now and that's led to –it's been a lot of writing, and led to a big increase in the word counts on the site. We're at somewhere around –oh, let me double check – 29,000 words –I want to say. Yeah, up from about 24,000 earlier in the week so it's been a lot, a lot, a lot, of text that's been added and I hope we start to see some improvements to SEO and things like that.

Really, starting the rest of the day and next week, It's my goal to flesh out as much as I can of what's left of the Python for Beginner Data Scientists course. I really can't procrastinate that anymore, and I feel like there's no other higher priority things.

Need to encourage users to log-in before completing exercises

Maybe one thing that needs to get done is adding a way for people who are not logged-in when they visit a specific course page to be reminded to log in so that their work can get saved. Or, maybe on exercises –which is primarily the place where it's really important that people are logged in– so that the code they write in the exercises is saved. Maybe just on those exercise pages, or on the exercises cells themselves I should restrict access to those –unless a user is logged-in. And I'd really like to then, hopefully, see some more user accounts getting created as people interact with the course and start to complete the exercises.

So that's the plan for next week –and the weekend if I get to it. And we'll see how quickly we can get our first full completed course up and running, and hopefully people like it. So, that's the update for today here towards the end of the week. Thanks for listening, I'll see you in our next vlog update.