Of categories and tags, and why they matter
Chris asked
What are the odds of getting an “Everything Else” feed that includes everything BUT the Two For Elbowing stuff, for those of us who liked how we had our RSS configured before? I like reading your stuff, but at the same time it would be annoying to manage six different Chuq feeds in my Personal folder where I only had the one before. (And the 24E bits I had going to my Sports folder.)
Which is a legitmate question. My answer was that it was unlikely to happen. With tools like Yahoo Pipes, though, it’s easy to set up a pipe that you can customize to your heart’s content (Chris wrote back, not having touched Pipes before, that it took him five minutes. Pipes is one of those tools you should have in your toolbelt, folks).
I took a look at just how granular I wanted to make the categorization and feeds. It gets really complicated really fast if you aren’t careful. Hell, even if you are careful. My original design for the categorization was two levels with tags (sports/hockey, tech/apple, tech/yahoo, etc), and mixing and matching categories, sub-categories and tags went to chaos really fast.
So I ended up doing a single level of categories, and everything else as tags. Each top level category has its own rss feed (see the sidebar on each page for them), and was set up as one of the core content areas I expect to talk about over time:
- About Chuq: My life as a series of random blog posts.
- Birdwatching: Birding and Birdwatching: things feathery.
- Living in Silicon Valley: Living in Silicon Valley; stuff to do, places to be, companies to start up….
- Photography: All things photography and digital imaging.
- The Offline Life: Things that make shutting down and unplugging part of your life: food, wine, books, movies and the great outdoors. Remember when your mom told you to go ouside and play? She was right..
- The Online Life: The tools, technologies, people companies and techniques that make the online life possible and interesting.
- Two for Elbowing – Hockey and Sports: Hockey and other sports, how the media and sports deal with each other, and the business realities of sports.
Two for Elbowing is what was on my sports blog, now integrated. Birdwatching and Photography are my two great lusts, where I’m focussing most of my “me” time these days, and in 2009, I plan on starting to move photography into a semi-pro or pro state. More on that later. Birdwatching is going to carry the content that was originally targetted for my now-parked siliconvalleybirders.org site, and which will at some point move back to that domain in some way (more on that later, too)
The Online Life is the area for talking about all of this “online stuff”, the work-geek-tech universe.
The Offline Life and Living in Silicon Valley are the core pieces of what was originally my “Dare2Thrive” project, which I was working heavily on when I left StrongMail, and which (story of my life the last couple of years) never launched. That’s another “more later”, yeah. Lots of that right now. The core for both of those is life balance, a growing focus of mine since I decided to leave Apple. Living in Silicon Valley is about the region and what makes it such a fun and interesting place to be (if you ever leave your cube and go outside!), while the Offline Stuff will be about all of those things you can (and should) do when you get away from that damn computer and that dumpy cube and take some time off.
Some discussion of the categories is on the postings page. I’m going to also put it in the sidebar one of these days.
One note for those wondering, there’s no top-level category about Apple. My writings about Apple will be in the Online Life, or perhaps in my “about me” category, as appropriate. You shouldn’t assume I’ll be writing less about Apple based on this, but that my writing about Apple will be more in balance with writing about the larger industry and about life in general. Of course, if that’s all you really care about, you can always grab an RSS feed of the Apple tag, but honestly, if your interest is that narrow, I feel sorry for you… You need to get outside more.
Tags will be used to define the content into narrow content areas. My goal is for most articles to live in only one top level category, but to use lots of tags to define what’s in each message. All of the defined tags are visible on the tags page, and there’s a tag cloud of the most common tags in use in the sidebar.
As long as I’m careful with tagging, that should really help with findability down the road, and minimize content duplication and search problems. At least, I hope so. It definitely solves the categorization problems I had on the old blogs, where the category system just didn’t fit well with where my writing went over time. This new setup should be more flexible as time and interests change, and require less re-architecting to stay clean and current. At least, that’s the ope.
Hmm. write one blog entry, promise three more. That’s probably a bad trend, no?
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