I noticed earlier today that the number of "structured data" items Googles Webmaster Tools was reporting it had found on my website had dropped. Given that I'm continually adding new recipes (albeit it takes a while for Google to process them, but I'm in no rush!), this surprised me a little. There's a graph that shows how the number of structured data items has changed over time in the tools:

A very quick, and short, post to point to a feature of Orchard called "Shape Tracing" that allows you to work out how a page is composed, and what views you'd need to create (and indeed it will create them for you!) to override presentation.

After putting together my post yesterday about adding a Summary field to blog posts, Sébastien Ros dropped a comment pointing out a tidier way to access the Summary property, giving this:

One of the things I like about ths blogs hosted at MSDN is that the blog owner can elect to have something different displayed under each post in a listing, instead of the CMS just taking the first N words / M characters and slapping a "read more" link on the end. This means that, for those that want to make the effort, each post can have a sub-title / snappy phrase that describes it. It doesn't even appear in the view of the posting itself (though I'm sure that's something that can be changed?)

In my last post, I showed you how simple it was to get Orchard Core installed and up and running in an existing web project by using the Orchard Core NuGet packages. This article carries on where we left off, and shows you how to enable and configure logging for your application.

This is probably very obvious (and it should be - it's a clickable link in the Orchard UI!), but I had to go off and ask Google if there was a way to preview a blog post I'm writing. It turns out there is (and it's been in Orchard for quite a while).

I manage a website with multiple blogs and this issue brought to my attention that on the admin summary for a blog (not a blog post) it displays comment information that doesn't actually work. To be honest, I had never even noticed that it displays any comment information at all. After initially flicking this off as a useless feature and we should remove the broken code from the comments module (I still am leaning toward this not being needed for core), I actually figured that this could actually be a pretty cool feature so I threw together a little module for it. You can grab the source on GitHub.

In my other blog I've been writing up recipes for years now, albeit with varying frequency, with a combination of recipes I've found and tweaked and recipes that I've created from scratch (the latter are fewer and further between, more refinement time is required to get them right!). When I started looking at the Google Search Console for my site, one of the things that jumped out at me was a section called "Search Appearance" which contains two interesting sub-sections, "Structured Data" and "Rich Cards". These basically feed off additional metadata and are part of what allows Google to customise how it parses and displays different types of content.