Earlier today I took care of a critical change to this lovely website which I thought would take an eternity and instead was so trivial I was able to do it on my lunch break with time to spare.
Categories. The most basic sorting method for posts on a blog. To say mine were a mess would be an accurate statement — not completely wrecked, but certainly the natural creep of 15 years of blog posts had shown its very ad-hoc nature, and my post categories were a bit all over the place.
In conjunction with my goal to redefine my focus here, as mentioned previously, I stripped the categories for this site to the most core elements, as best I can, and I think this taxonomy will hold well moving forward. I’m going to practice the best discipline I can to accurately categorize posts as broadly as possible, and tag appropriately.
Tags… oh boy, that’s where the problem lies. The removed categories were changed into tags, which is fine, but there are nearly 3000 tags in the database, many of which were used for only one post, and that,s going to be its own thing to clean up over time. That is what it is however, an over time project. Moving forward with proper tagging discipline I should at least set myself up for success in the future, and for older content I can steadily clean up and re-tag important posts where necessary. More focused than categories, sure, but not so precise that I wind up with single use tags beyond where necessary. The internet has changed, after all, search wise, and post tags and categories only play so much into the meta — the rest is pure content which I’m certainly able to provide.
These little update posts I plan over the course of this week will, I hope, allow me to regain my focus on writing and provide you, the reader, with some inside thoughts on how I am as a blogger — nay, as a writer. It’s nice to return to the written.. er, typed, word, but I have found myself comfortable with live streaming and certainly won’t be giving that up any time soon, but for the sake of my time and some sanity, condensing ideas into text may be the best for the near future, and something I will try to continue in earnest, succeeding where I have failed so many times before.
Oh, right, the categories. They have been refined to:
- Science
- History
- Technology
- Gaming
- Entertainment
- Society
- Skepticism
- Life
I think they are all pretty explanatory, but I’ll use the WordPress feature to describe tags soon, for what value it adds.
Next up, some fresh content and some light tag cleanup.
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