I mentioned here on the blog a while ago that I was going through my old posts – updating links, making sure videos still worked, and removing some overly negative posts about an old workplace and about one particular family member.
As a part of this process, I realised that my categories were.. not brilliant. Not at all optimal. They really needed someone with a pedantic flair to take a look at them and completely re-do them. Hmm. Who do I know with a pedantic flair? This seemed like a job for only one person on earth – my excellent friend Sephyroth.
So I sent off an email on February 28th..
And on March 23rd, I received me a reply! Parent categories with child categories. This seemed like a good plan.
For some reason I thought I would wait until I finished going through all the posts in order to make the suggested changes. That was a bit of a mistake to be honest. But on the 1st of June I finally finished reviewing all the posts and so I sat down today to begin making the changes.. half an hour later, I sent off another email..
The Other Half helped out by adding the little + and – so that all you will see to begin with is the parent categories. Like this –
If you click on the parent category, you will see all posts for that parent category. I may still do some tweaking in the weeks to follow, but for now I’m happy with the results. YAY! ;)
In Other Blog News
I made some changes to the right hand sidebar, adding more articles and putting them in different categories.
Sephyroth helped me out once again with the padding on the posts because we had to do a theme update and lost a lot of our changes to the theme as a surprise. This will not happen again as we are now using a child theme, long story and way too technical, but it means things like link colour, text size, and teeny little settings on the blog that readers are not even aware of, like 10 pixels of padding around paragraphs, headings and photos, are in a separate file so future updates to the theme will not cause those changes to be lost.
On the right hand sidebar, The Other Half coded a thing, which means my comments no longer appear in the most recent comments stream. This is great because I often go through and reply to comments in one sitting, so you tend to see a lot of comments from me suddenly.
Yesterday..
Wow, what a huge day here on the blog yesterday! Just 3 minutes after the scam warning post went live, on average there were 120 visitors every hour. Interestingly, there was a very Australian skew to the people who were sent this email. Here’s a screenshot taken at midnight AEST..
People from 22 more countries than you can see here dropped by, which makes 32 countries in total. Many of the people who arrived were good enough to take the time to leave a comment with the name and email address and in some cases the email they were sent. Plus, a lot of people sent me emails via my contact page with that info.
I’ve sent an email off to outlook.com to let them know what has been going on, because every email address used was an outlook.com one. Most troubling, they seem to be bot generated.
What’s Happening At Yours?
Let me know in the comments! :)
I noticed the plus outs there on the sidebar – that looks awesome! ;) I would say that that is probably beyond my genius mess (genius-ness plus apparently I cannot spell genius cos I want to put an o in there)
Also too, that paragraph fix? That was done whilst I was literally *in* a hot tub with my phone ;)
Here’s an idea: why not go the whole hog and use the Dewey System? :) This would enable you to categorize every post exactly and future scholars could find the information they require by following the numbers.
I have very few categories and use only a few of those. Being too hung up on categories risks putting you in a straitjacket by limiting what you can include in a post or having to acknowledge 92 categories because of all the things you mention.
I don’t think readers ever look at categories. What’s the point? If you like a blog, you read every post, no matter what the category. If you don’t like the blog you won’t read a post just because of its category.
I think my problem is, I never thought about categories when I started my blog. And now there’s a whole heap of them and it was very disorganised, it was driving me up the wall. Now, it feels like I have a plan and I get where the plan is going. People quite often arrive on my blog via a category rather than via a post, so it is a Bit Of A Thing. ;)
Also, people can choose to read a specific category only in their feed reader. Not that I expect people do, but it can be done which is interesting and awesome. :)
I went through some of the categories which were double ups, removed categories which I no longer saw a need for, and, for the first time ever, there are zero uncategorized posts here! :)
I haven’t categorised a single thing on my blog and I’m not about to start now. If i ‘break’ it, I don’t have a Sephyroth to come fix it for me. besides, I like mine just the way it is. Simple, easy to get along with, like me.
Categories do make it easier for people to read my blog, and also makes it easier for the search engines to send new people to my blog.
It is important for search engine optimization and it is one reason why my posts get high up in the search rankings within minutes of posting, so that people can easily find my scam posts.. :)
Some people use tags which is another way of doing things, I’ve put some tags on the scam posts for the names the scammers are using.
But everyone gets to blog their own way, which is the cool thing. ;)
River, I’ve had some more time to think about this and I really think categories would work beautifully on your blog. Here’s just one reason why –
Take your Sunday Selections. If you went through and put every Sunday Selections post into a Sunday Selections category, then people participating linked to a Sunday Selections category rather than each weekly post, then people clicking through would always get the most recent Sunday Selections first rather than just seeing one weekly post.
Also, if a new visitor to your blog liked the Sunday Selections and wanted to read more of them, they could easily click on the category at the bottom of the post and the only posts that would show up would be ones you have categorized as Sunday Selections.
If you went through and did that for your Whimsical Wednesdays and your Musical Mondays and the various different things you write each week, then if someone really liked one of those things, they could click on the category and see all the similar posts rather than having to dig back through every post.
Your blog is uniquely suited to categories because you have specific things you post every week. :)
Anyway that was me just putting my Pedantic Sephyroth hat on momentarily. :)
Ah, well organised friends are always a blessing! :)
Sephyroth has a mind that thinks in a way mine cannot, at times. :) He is uber amazing. Next I just have to convince him to get back into blogging more regularly – and to update his blog theme etc.