[...] I’ve been trying to figure a way to organise my website using categories and tags for a while. The problem with my website is that it’s not very focused. (Apparently [...]

Thanks Rivercrow! (For some reason your comment got flagged as spam, so sorry I didn\’t appear for a while.)

I\’ve been doing some work on site for someone else and I started to realise that I should really redo the theme for my site and I\’ve also become a little more merciless about categories. This other site is a very clean site and I played around with \”tags\” on it (I used Ultimate Tag Warrior 3 plugin for wordpress).

I\’m thinking now that categories should only be used if you want to present a set of entries differently from the rest or to take advantage of some plugin/feature. For example, in my revising thinking I would keep the \”Computer Games\” and \”Software\” category because these represent downloads and reference material. Likewise I\’d keep my \”Drawing\” category as I\’d present my art a little differently to normal blog posts. I\’d also keep my \”writings\” category (but remove the roleplaying sub-category one) as these would be non-blog-like posts. I think I would too add a \”site news/maintenance\” category. I\’d also keep the LJ category because it\’s used by a plugin.

Instead, I would place all the (what would be) non-category entries in \”uncategorized\” (though I might rename this) and use tags to organise it. I think it\’s a pointless task to try and categories these near-random entries, in a sense it limits what I would talk about. I\’d try and place my post in the \”right\” category before I write it, if you know what I mean. With tags, the entires get categorized organically and they all get linked.

With this method, for example, I wouldn\’t need to have a WordPress sub-category for Software and Tech, instead I\’d have entries tagged with a \”Wordpress\” tag and you could then see my thoughts and software related to WordPress.

I thinking this approach works when your blog doesn\’t have a strict focus but yet you\’d like to be able to present some of the work of your hobbies/interests. I think if your blog has got a good goal, a fixed set of categories would be perfect.

I’ve struggled with sorting my categories too–which is a sad admission as I aspire to become an indexer!

I also separated the site maintenance news out. It seems logical.

I’ve separated out my personal musings and actual memories from my creative writing (fiction, poetry, quasi-autobiographical). That’s similar to how you’re sorting out your RPG from Tech from Thoughts.

I enjoy your site. Thanks for the WP integration tips!