Traffic has slowed a bit, and instead of trying to force momentum, I’ve gone into backend mode. When the front-end quiets, the only sensible response is to strengthen the foundations. That’s where all my energy has gone this week.
1. The theme is fighting me.
I’ve been stuck on a simple problem: author name, date, and comment count are not appearing under the post title.This is basic metadata. It should be visible. Instead, it’s buried at the bottom of every post. I mentioned this on WhatsApp; Furqan said the alternative theme I was looking at “looks archaic.” Fair. And yet the current setup is forcing my hand. To fix this I may need to build a child theme, which is technically more involved, but necessary if we want BP to look and function like a proper archive rather than a hobby blog. These are small details, but they shape usability.
2. Categories finally make sense.
Categories used to be the most frustrating element on BP. Nothing fit neatly: region? religion? politics? diaspora? Everything overlapped. So I rebuilt them around what actually matters:
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Author
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Popularity
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Podcast vs text
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Tags as the real index
It already feels cleaner. Navigation makes sense. Posts are now findable by structure, not guesswork.
3. Tags are the long-term strategy.
Since BP is archived by Google News, tags are no longer decorative. They’re infrastructure. They determine what survives in the search ecosystem. I’ve started expanding and standardising them with that in mind. It’s slow work, but it’s the kind of work that compounds.
4. Slow periods are where the real building happens.
Instead of being discouraged by the quiet, I’ve taken it as a cue to dig deeper. Everything I’ve learned in my own work applies here: projects only die when people stop improving them. If you keep updating the wiring, the system doesn’t collapse. Deep work in the background is what keeps a platform alive.
5. Brown Pundits is becoming a dynamic archive.
More than anything, this round of backend work has made me realise how much BP has accumulated: debates, essays, polemics, long comment threads, diaspora reflections, cultural arguments. Fifteen years of material. This isn’t just a blog anymore. It’s a record of a conversation stretching across continents and generations. Optimising the structure is a way of honouring that. That’s it for now. I’m documenting the process because, in quiet seasons, it’s important to hold the thread. The surface may look still, but the backend is moving.