It happened again. The WordPress publishing system added a version 2 to the post from yesterday. It’s super annoying. I did not make a draft or anything and just published one time. The final version ended up with 20241217-2 as part of the url or slug. Other people have complained about this appending of the -2 to posts. I don’t have a draft or anything in my trash. I write each post in a Google Doc and move my content over with a simple cut and paste which takes maybe 30 seconds to be ready to publish. I cut and paste the content into the post and set a category, newsletter preference, and some tags. None of that takes very long or invokes a draft of any sort. After a bunch of research it seems that the -2 will append to posts titles that are numeric only. That may be what is happening and it’s apparently systematically being applied. We will see if it continues to happen across the next few posts. It appears the solution would be to move to using the plain permalinks option that uses the post ID number instead of the post title. Alternatively, I could put the letter z before the numeric title in YYYYMMDD format. 

You probably figured out by now that I just let WordPress drop the -2 after the post title this time around. That is terrible for search engine optimization. Generally speaking that is not really a problem for me. It is however a formatting problem that aesthetically bothers me and I’m going to have to dig into a little bit more later. This is indeed a problem for future Nels. In protest of having to figure this out, I spent part of this evening watching episodes 5 and 6 from season 12 of The Curse of Oak Island using the History Channel application. You probably are aware that I have pretty much seen every episode of the entire series and that it is my guilty pleasure television show. I just keep watching and they just keep digging all over Oak Island. The strangest part of the History Channel application watching experience is that the commercials repeat a lot. 

My big plan to write some weblog posts on a more consistent basis seems to be working well enough. Over the last few days my eBay bids have all started to fall off. I’m considering getting some other type of storage box for my graded cards to help sort all my George Brett cards. My Topps card vertical is sitting in a nice wood box on my desk. That vertical collection runs from 1975 to current. I have a lot of other cards from other brands, but I’m not really storing them in vertical order. I think that is something that could change in 2025. 

Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado