On the move again, this time skipping westwards along the coast to the [Costa Tropical](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_Tropical), stopping for the night in a [campsite at Castillo de Baños](http://www.campingcastillo.com/en/). It was the Costa Tropical that we’d first identified as the part of Spain that we’d like to visit, so its great to finally be here! As it was a bit of a grey and blustery day today, we’ve not ventured further than the supermarket, but the place looks a bit depressing. We came past enough plastic greenhouses today to cover the whole planet I’m sure, and there are some immediately around us.
Polopos, Spain
Mind you, for a campsite its reasonable. There is a large contingent of Brits – looks like the [Camping and Caravanning Club](http://www.campingandcaravanningclub.co.uk/) made a large reservation. Our pitch couldn’t be much closer to the sea if we drove down the beach and parked with the waves lapping around our wheel hubs. As long as there isn’t a tsunami I think we’ll be ok.
On the blog front, I did finally get the inspiration to make some long awaited changes, without the need to revamp the whole damn thing, which had been somewhat off putting. I decided in the end to make some changes to see how it might affect ‘engagement’ with the site.
First of all, I’ve changed the home (and category index) pages so that they only show summaries of the posts. The purposes of this is to give me a greater insight into which topics are being read. The homepage is the most visited single page of the site, but if you can read the last 10 posts without navigating elsewhere, you will not click on the links to the pages you do want to read, and as a result my [analytics won’t tell me what you’ve read](http://www.google.com/analytics/) – just that you’ve ‘loaded’ the homepage. So this gives me greater insight and hopefully allows me to tailor what and how I write for the better. The summaries are only shown when I add ‘featured images’ to the posts, otherwise they will appear in longer form. This will often happen which I first post, and slightly later I’ll come back and make edits.
Secondly, I’ve added the ability to [link articles together into a ‘series’](http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/serial-posts/). When you view the article specific page, the footer at the bottom of the article will tell you if there are others in the series and what their titles are, giving you a quicker link to follow along with related articles. Hopefully this will also help with search engines by [grouping related content together](http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/serial-posts/).
And finally, I’m going to endeavour to add more information to my articles to flesh them out a bit. This is partly for my benefit – there are lots of things I often wonder about the places I visit, or find out at the time, but fail to capture and remember – so this will be something of a ‘bookmarking’ exercise. Also, because I often post direct from the iPhone, I often cut things a bit short because typing is a little laborious. Now I want to post, then revisit the articles and look up some of the things I couldn’t find at the time. For example, I’ve expanded an article I wrote yesterday whilst exploring [the gold mines at Rodalquilar so that it includes some information about the history of the mines](/cycling/the-gold-mines-of-rodalquilar), something I couldn’t discern at the time from the information board (written in Spanish). But once back at base, I’ve been able to do some research and find some useful info, which I hope you’ll enjoy as well.
I’m not sure how much if any difference this will make, but it hopefully will mean I’m better informed about how the site is being utilised, and that should allow me to improve it.
