Per Merriam Webster:
Colophon
an inscription at the end of a book or manuscript usually with facts about its production
I borrow the term here to disclose the inner details of this site’s construction.
Technical Bones: Foundational Components
Here are the foundational pieces, with explanations for any of my non-website-obsessed friends or acquaintances (or random visitors) who may want to know more.
WordPress, of course. It’s what you call a content management system. It’s the foundation on which the rest of the house is built. It stores all the writing I’ve done, and has templates that determine how it all gets spit onto a webpage when someone hits a link. That makes it possible to churn out pages that all look the same, and update them in bulk by updating a template, rather than hardcode each individual page.
GenerateBlocks Pro. This is a “block editor” in WordPress lingo. It’s like Legos for the web. You can add a “block” to a page to contain text, images, and other stuff, and you get a nice set of controls to pick and choose how you want it to look and behave. Much easier than writing PHP or dealing with native WordPress.
GeneratePress Premium. It’s a “theme editor,” which means you can construct those templates to give your site, in the governing cliche, a consistent “look and feel” based on reusable bit parts that you can style without having deep knowledge of web stuff like HTML and CSS. (This is a bit of a simplification. Knowing that nerd stuff definitely helps, and I did occasionally stick a finger into the works to tweak some of that stuff.)
Advanced Custom Fields. This “plugin” helps you create custom fields in your WordPress database to hold stuff specific to your needs. Like the genre of each movie, or the star rating. It also provides a means to create a database of movie personnel and add them to the individual movies they directed, wrote, or acted in.
Other Helpful Components
These plugins provided additional umph when I wanted to go overboard:
Independent Analytics is a website reporting tool that tells me how many people have visited this website, how many times a particular post has been viewed, what countries they came from, and what web browser they were using. This info helps reinforce the humility I must show in acknowledging this is a hobby and not a profession. It also occasionally helps me see where I might need to invest some more effort. It’s important to point out, from a visitor privacy perspective, that this tool collects only aggregate, anonymous visitor statistics; it does not collect information that would identify a particular person, such as their IP address. Thus, it complies with privacy regulations such as GDPR
Slim SEO. That stands for “search engine optimization,” which is the magic that enables you to Google for “best recipe for gluten-free brownies” and get about a hundred links to websites you’ve never heard of. (All with the same recipe, but that’s something else.) Follow the rules for SEO, and maybe you can work your way up the Google returns from position 250 to 100 to 75 to … well, I digress. This tool grabs info out of a post and inserts additional coding into the web page that Google (or other search engines, if indeed there are other search engines) can read to better understand what’s on the page and maybe include you in someone’s search. I do this because it’s the right thing to do. I certainly am under no illusion this site will ever be found for any meaningful search.
Admin and Site Enhancements. Just another something under the covers that helps me customize the way the WordPress dashboard shows my stuff to me.