Hello. Welcome to my site. My name is Laura Brown, from Ontario, in Canada.

I make ASCII art. I was born in the year of the dragon. I like vintage science fiction. I'm an agnostic Witch. I'm a history enthusiast and I like learning new things about technology, science, and so on. Sometimes I'm contrary for the sake of being contrary. Well, you never know what you might learn when you don't just go with the crowd or popular opinions. 

Note: The colour combination for this site is based on the idea of - black, white, and read all over. I had the idea years ago and thought it was funny, in a good way. 

I routinely get rid of plugins and themes I'm not using. At this point I only use GeneratePress, so dealing with themes is as simple as not doing anything, I just have one theme and it updates itself.

If you have found one theme you like working with, get rid of the rest. Including the WordPress default themes. If you are not using them, don't keep them hanging around asking to be updated for no reason. If you ever do want to go back to one of them, or use it to test your site, you can just download one again. I did this when I had an error and wanted to be sure it was nothing to do with my theme. It wasn't.

Don't keep plugins around for cosmetic reasons, in case you decide to use it later, or give it another try. Even dormant, deactivated plugins can cause errors on your site. Just make a note of the plugin name (or have a test site you can leave stuff like extra plugins) and delete it from your working/ active site.

If you have any plugins which are not automatically updated, get the newest file and update them. I have some plugins which I did not get through the WordPress plugin directory, some of those need to be manually updated. Plugins I like using with ClassicPress I update from files on GitHub. Plugins I have paid for I download from the developer's site.

Most of the steps to clean up your site are simple. Get rid of the unnecessary clutter like:

• old post revisions
• tags you don't use (or merge them with tags you make more use of)
• pages no longer used (some may have been created by plugins)
• comment spam you've been ignoring
• user profiles which aren't in use (update your own)
• broken links in posts, resource lists, or bookmarks
• image and media files not attached to anything (or not being used as headers, banners, etc.).
• generic/default content from the theme you are using
• plugins and themes (as I wrote above)

You can also clean up your database. Some plugins which tackle this also go through old post revisions and comment spam. Read the instructions and always backup your site before using a plugin to clean it. It is so much easier to delete the backup file you don't need than to regret not having one while fixing the damage later. If in doubt, talk to your web host. See what they recommend.

The Broken Link Checker plugin does a really great job of finding broken links (including broken image file links) and helping you fix them.

Cleaning Up Posts

Cleaning up posts is a much bigger job to tackle. It will help if you have already done all the other cleaning first. That will help you find broken things and fix them or choose not to keep them. So some of your post clean up is already done.

My site isn't for business, commercial or marketing so I don't need to focus on a big post clean up to impress Google, or any other service. I clean up posts for human readers. I don't mind to keep old posts around. Even the outdated content is an archive of things I have seen and done.

I am going through and updating links, or unlinking the original site if I can't find another option. It's fun and sad to see which sites I remember and which are still online. I get sidetracked trying to find people who used to run the sites and see what they are doing now.

I do have broken image files, a lot of them. I moved and merged my sites together. I've been slowly cleaning up which means finding old images on my hard drive or making new images to replace those I can't find. I'm far from done. If you have moved things around chances are you have a trail of broken links and images too.

Also, posts I planned to write but have left as draft or pending posts. After sitting in pending awhile the original post you had linked to or gotten the idea from may be gone. Or, the idea has lost its importance, relevance, or inspiration for you. If you haven't published something in there after a year you have moved on from it or have plenty of other fresher content and ideas to keep you busy.

This is a list online, no doubt there are others. I'd add to the point about similar content and say that you could link all the related posts instead of merging or out right deleting them. Turn them into a series of posts with an index linking all the relevant posts at the bottom (or top) of each post.

• Content that is out of date or irrelevant now and needs to be deleted.
• Information that needs to be updated (in particular, check your About and Contact pages).
• Poor-quality content that's better off removed or replaced.
• Content that is too similar (for instance, if you have two posts on identical subjects, you may want to only keep the best one).

Source: Complete Guide to Cleaning Up Your WordPress Website - DreamHost

Celebrate the end of the clean up, especially if you had a lot of clean up to do.

Keep the clean up in mind as you publish and maintain your site. Not everything has to wait for a once a year cleaning. Maintain as you go along.

I haven't heard of all of these, so I expect some will be news to other photographers too. This matters especially when you are selling your photographs. If you are writing out something about the rights people have with your photos, these would be good terms to know.

Photos have copyrights assigned to them and you need to make sure you’re following the laws. Here are some things to consider:

• Editorial Use: the right to use in blogs, websites, magazines, newspapers, etc.
• Commercial Use: Can be used to market products/services.
• Retail Use: Can be used to create and sell physical products.
• Exclusive: Only one person can buy the license to use the photo. No-one else can use the photo.
• Non-Exclusive: Numerous other people can buy the license to use the image.
• Public Domain: There are no restrictions on the use of the photo.
• Creative Commons: Can put conditional usage of the work, until it is not required by law.
• Royalty Free: Anyone can purchase a license for the photo and use it for an unlimited amount of time and duration.
• Rights Managed: There are distribution limitations when you purchase a license. This is often the number of times the image is used/viewed by users.
• Rights Of Publicity: The subject of which the photo is used for is restricted.

Source: How To Sell Photos On Shopify - ShopThemeDetector

I don't think a generic web directory is very worthwhile these days. We are still keeping the old Open Directory Project going, now at curlie.org. But, now it is owned by one person who has their own idea of what matters. Software seems to matter more than getting people involved or helping them find it (again, or ever). One way or another I think the old directory is a bygone thing. Although I still like working on it and still (for some reason) can't leave it behind, I don't believe it is important any more.

But, I do think a list of links, better to think of it as a list of resources, about a specific topic, is a good thing and very useful. So I am still keeping and building my links for urban exploration and ASCII art and a few other things.

I have found that just an HTML list of links is a bit iffy. For some reason they end up a mess almost every time I have tried. Unless it is a very short list, three or so links. Larger lists seem to get muddled with HTML and one link gets the URL of another link and the original URL is lost, until you hunt for it again. It's frustrating. So I am using software, which has its own little battles and hurdles.

Here is my current list of useful software for keeping a list of resources (or web directory), specifically for WordPress and ClassicPress sites.

Link Library - I've tried others, may others, but I come back to Link Library. Not only is it steady, reliable and free to use (be kind and donate to support the plugin) but it brings out more features and is still in development and it works. It is huge when you first load it and try to work your way around. There is some help at GitHub, a wiki, which helps. Don't get discouraged or flustered, just keep working at it.

Simple Link Directory - I paid to use the pro version of this plugin. But, setting up links with categories is so confusing... I just wanted to stop spending so much time on just understanding how it works. I wasn't making progress, my links were sitting in text files waiting for me to add them but I kept having to add more categories that weren't categories because that's not how this works. Maybe its because I've worked in a web directory for so many years and got used to doing things in that way... but this never got simple for me.

Simple Links by Mat Lipe - This plugin is now closed, as of this month. I don't know why, likely assorted reasons. I still have my paid version. But, I never got it to set up my link lists the way I wanted them, even with the addons. It is a simpler plugin to work with than Link Library. If you can get, or still have, the paid version keep going with it.

Simple Link Library Plugin - Right now I'd say this is a back up plan. I did try it a little but it seemed to rely on the old core WordPress link plugin, which I already had. The screenshots look good and it says it has a broken link checker. It's one I'd keep a link around for.

Lastly, for people who keep lists of links I highly recommend Broken Link Checker. Although Link Library has this feature, others do not. Or, if you want to keep lists of links as regular posts to your site instead of using plugins, you really need something to help you keep track of which links have moved, changed, or bit the dust.

If you wander into this site and stay more than a second or two, you may wonder why its here at all. This site began as my first personal site (I'm not sure what year that was now) then the domain was sort of hijacked. The person who was hosting the domain forgot to pay for it on time. So, I lost the domain. For many years. I did keep running my own sites, personal, for other people and some on other networks:  Suite101, Lockergnome, BackWash, BellaOnline, HubPages, Squidoo, and others I can't think of right now. But, when I typed thatgrrl.com into the domain search and it showed up as available (no longer owned by anyone not using it but asking thousands of dollars for it) I bought it again. So here it is.

Meanwhile, I had several other sites and domains which I was burnt out from trying to run. Plus, there are very few people still keeping sites for personal reasons rather than monetizing, commercializing, tracking, spying, and you know the rest if you have been around online awhile. Most of the software for making websites has become customized for people making cookie cutter sites for clients and selling it as professional websites. I did not learn a lot of HTML, far from much when it came to software, scripts, etc. But, I still work on my sites, by myself with the help of software developers and others when I search for it online.