An Under The Plumage Update

That’s right — the Crow website is becoming just as pretty on the inside as it is on the outside! Or should it be frontend and backend? Either way, we’ve been revamping the infrastructure of our website, and we wish to share our progress with you.

Weeding the Media Library

In December 2024, Crowbirds Sarah Buwick and Dr. Aleksandra Swatek launched our fantastic website redesign after many months of collaboration. Now the interface bursts with a vibrant new color palette created in 2022 by Anna Shura, a polished layout design, and plenty of engaging images that amplify our writing (i.e. all the awesome featured images on our blog posts!). All of their hard work paid off tremendously for writecrow.org.

However, after such a significant technical project, there’s bound to be a mess left in the metaphorical kitchen. That is to say we’ve still got parts and tools lying around that need our attention, the first a repository of all our site’s media files: the media library!

Over the years it has amassed hundreds of images and videos, many of which were no longer being used by the redesigned website. So Crowbird Ethan Simmelink set out to perform this pre-spring spring-cleaning, employing the Media Cleaner plugin to systematically remove any unnecessary files from the media library. This consisted primarily of duplicate images and images without an assigned web content page. Check out the nerdy numbers!

With this he found great success and nearly no issues. Nearly. On occasion, Media Cleaner incorrectly determined a few of our post’s “featured images” were worthy of deletion. This mistake forced some backtracking to recover and replace them. A small issue, but one to mention for any fellow Media Cleaner users nonetheless.

BeforeAfter

Before After

Optimization Results: 566 → 295 files | 47.9% reduction in storage overhead

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Images Cleaned:

Storage Saved: 376.56 MB. (The Crow leadership team has respectfully declined to repurpose this space for 11.77 copies of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.)

Purgin’ the Plugins

Similar to the media library, many of our plugins needed to be… well, unplugged.

Anyway.

This problem was a natural consequence of web development, likely many readers who’ve dabbled in the field understand. Unlike a typical LEGO set with predetermined pieces, not every piece (or plugin) will be used in the final build of a set (or site). Consider it closer to LEGO Masters, a TV show where contests create with a near-infinite pool of supplies. Inevitably for builder and developer alike, the actual implementation will stray from the original conception, leaving many unused parts.

Thus, trial and error (with heavy emphasis on error) is the lifeblood of all programming. Ethan Simmelink and Dr. Bradley Dilger faced a similar experience in this cleaning process without an equivalent panacean plugin like Media Cleaner. That would not stop them, however.

Through eloquent discussion and brute force, the pair was able to strip away the frills and return with these nerdy numbers:

BeforeAfter

Before After

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Plugins Purged:

What’s Next?

There’s always a next — that’s the beauty of web development. Solving one problem will lead to your next ten. But we’ll stick with one for now. That being maximizing the potential of our remaining plugins to better serve our website and, of course, you all.

Until next time!