Someone once said "Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once."

Categories on my blog are a way to:

1. Categories intentionally group the posts for convenient retrieval at a later date. The retrieval could also be done by using the Search function, which is more flexible, but which also requires key words be the same across the posts one is looking for. Still, I tend to Search first, and fall back on Categories later.
2. Very secondarily, categories can cue a reader as to what to expect (especially when put at the top of a post).

When this blog first started, it didn't have categories, largely because Blogger didn't support it at the time. Even after I changed over to MT, it took a while before I did a mass categorization. Since then I've occasionally gone in and added categories, shifted things around, etc., but the organization is not as strong (or as thorough) as I'd like. There is no easy and quick way to categorize everything.

I've come up with a taxonomy of 84 category/subcategories that I could push all my content into. That number is subject to revision (probably upwards). That's up from the 35 categories I currently have. It will make it easier to zero in on posts on a certain topic. And it will also let me have full-text category archives (instead of excerpt archives).

The question is -- should I do all that work? And it will be a lot of work. Even with the faster rebuilds, it will take time.

So ... what do you think? Is it too much effort? Are excerpted category archives okay? Does anyone here actually use the category archives here? Is Search a better, more complete option? Does anybody know what time it is? Does anyone really care?

Inquiring minds want to know!

Filed under :: Blogging

As it's set up now, the excerpted message text is a little too short to figure out what many posts are about. Perhaps if the excerpts were a little longer, it would work ok.

But in the end, it's your blog, and you should do what makes the most sense for you. I can live with either search or a set of archives, but since you probably spend more time in your blog than anyone else, you should do what will work for you rather than what will work for any of the rest of us.

I've bumped the excerpts from 20 to 30 words.

I will, as always, make the final decision based on my needs (since, as you say, I spend more time here than anyone else). I occasionally but rarely use the categories, but I'm anal enough to think that (hyper)categorizing everything makes some sort of grand philosophical sense -- but if there are folks who do use the categories, or if there's a factor I haven't taken in mind, I'm certainly interested in hearing it.

This question is important to me because I'm getting ready to move my blog from Blogger to its own domain and am working on taxonomy right now. It's giving me headaches.

The human mind is a pattern-seeking engine and mine sees a kind of pattern in the hurricane of topics that swirl around me. Trouble is, someone else's mind will see a different pattern in the same hurricane. My taxonomy could very well be completely opaque to them, like those "magic pictures" where you're supposed to see a 3-D image, always are to me.

Currently I'm leaning toward forcing myself to use only ten categories, or even five, and let the visitor's mind see what it wants to see. Descriptions and a good search function could fill in the gaps. Of course I may change my mind tomorrow if one of those magic pictures suddenly jumps out at me.

Quoth ***Dave ...

I've more than once discovered I needed to add a new category after a particular event or topic engendered a particular flurry of posts.

My problem is, I'm not always consistent, and how I see things being grouped over time changes, and things are never quite completely done up the way I want them to be.

Oh, well. I'm sure I'll figure something out.