Since my foray into LiveJournal, I’ve started writing more for my website (which is more and more becoming like some sort of blog). However the way entries are organised on my webpage (I’m talking about thedeadone.net and not livejournal) means that most of my writing gets filed under the general category: “News, rants, opinions and general thoughts”. Not a clever way of doing it. So I need a little feedback on it…
I was using categories to highlight particular entries, ones that I felt formed a more complete article or are, in themselves, for presentation. For example, software I wrote and made available is filed under software but when I write about software, I don’t put it under there. This is probably not a clear-cut example as it makes sense to have a separate category for downloadable software. I better example is roleplaying. This is in the subcategory of writing. Here I put mostly complete articles that I would like to have people find easily. However I’ve written much more about roleplaying that I haven’t put in there because it’s either throw-away or I’m still thinking about it.
What I was thinking of doing, was to be more free with my category usage, breaking up my general category into numerous others but then having a category called “Gallery” which contains a subset of categories. I can assign an entry to multiple categories so I assign under the correct category and if I want to highlight it on my website, I stick it also under the gallery one. Then, from the main links on my webpage you can browse the gallery category for my showy articles and from there then explore the more general categories. In a sense using categories like “tags” and then using the special Gallery subset of categories as the way I have been using categories all along. Is this a good way of doing it? What do other people think?
One of the problems with reorganising my categories is that it changes the url’s of my articles. Which can mean they get picked up as “new” articles by the various feeds such as redbrick planet. I’d like to get this right in one step, so I have to make sure that it’s a good layout. If I do re-orgainse, it’s probaly a good idea to trim back and delete some of my entries, perhaps archiving really old ones that, to be honest, are utter rubbish, mental note to self.
Aside: mental doodle (which is described here somewhere) for this week: “I walk the moonlight path, the stars dancing on infinity. The Devil sings a lullaby while the Angels die on stakes. Far below is Earth, far above is darkness; the dead void of fear and hate, full of the light of madness. Seek the voidless untruth and find the greatest truth of all.”
Update #1: Did a little surf’in and found this and this articles from a wordpress blogger called Lorelle. Seems she’s done much more thinking on the subject of using categories and tags. More food for thought. In a sense, my “gallery” idea could be done using WordPress categories and then I just “tag” all my other posts. However I’m not completely happy with that. It would provide an immediate solution… but that still leaves the majority of my entries sitting in “news” or (worse) I could stick them all in uncategorized. I’d like to be able to categorize my existing entries, just for my own sense of order.
Update #2: No comments yet, so I figure it’s okay to add my thoughts directly to the article. So I did a brief scan of all my previous posts. I’m quite happy to leave them all, oddly, though I may update links and such that have gone dead.
Categories to leave alone
I’m happy enough with these categories. I see no reason to change them. These would have formed the bulk of what I was calling “Galleries”.
Computer Games > Quake; Quake 2; Vampire the Masquerade Redemption;
Drawings > 3D; Alice in Wonderland; Black and White; Character; Chargey Studies; Renegade Art; Sketchs
LJ
Software
Writing > Roleplaying; Short Stories
Categories to remove
There is really only one problematic category. Even from the title, it is obvious the category needs to be split.
News, rants, opinions and general thoughts
Categories to add
This is how I’d imagine breaking down the all-consuming news category
News > Webpage; Personal
I would split actual “news” into two. “Personal” (which is kind of like a blog) and “Webpage” which is about the webpage; new features, changes, updates, etc.
Thoughts
Thoughts, “off-topic” posts and rants. At some point I should review them of course and see if a new category is needed.
Projects
News, rabblings, thoughts, etc. about any personal projects such as RPGs, writing and software.
Tech
Writings about programming, technology, software etc.
Weird
Weird stuff I found. I do try to avoid posting links I find via digg.com and boingboing.net but occasionally stuff passes my way that I find interesting.
Writing > Musings
Thoughts, articles, rabblings and other tit-bits to do with writing in general.
I’d also expand my usage of Writing > Roleplaying. Right now it’s a mix of full articles and adventures. It will now also contain my thoughts on roleplaying too.
Is this a good layout?
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!
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.
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