Darren Rowse recently asked ‘How Many Categories Does Your Blog Have?‘ It’s a question most bloggers and even myself struggle with on a regular basis. I’ve recently made some comprehensive changes to the way I categorise entries on my blog and I thought I would just share my categorisation/organisation strategy.
The guinea pig for my blog reorganisation was myMacBUZZ. I’ve recently pruned down its categories from 20+ to just 7. Key to my new organisation structure was the UltimateTagWarrior WordPress plugin. Here’s how I used it to complement WordPress’ categories.
First I renamed my categories into sections. myMacBUZZ is now organised by sections rather than categories. Sections on myMacBUZZ are similar to sections in a newspaper, with different sections offering different types of content. So now myMacBUZZ offers Articles, Features, Editorials and Site News among others.
While sections describe the format of the content, tags describe the content itself. This way, tags function more as metadata and allow more granular categorisation of the blog entries. Tagging is also less rigid than categories and can I can easily add new tags and worry less about which parent category it belongs too. UltimateTagWarrior also adds the rel=tag attribute so search engines like Technorati pick them up and draw traffic in.
The only drawback to this system is that there is less structure to the organisation of the site. Also, once your tag list has grown quite significant, you tend to use different words that mean the same thing, e.g. ‘OS X’ and ‘osx’. Luckily UltimateTagWarrior lets you set synonyms so that both tags in our example will show articles tagged with both.
Besides these small drawbacks, I’m quite happy with this new organisation system. In fact, that’s how I organise this blog now – there are only two categories here haha. Between myMacBUZZ’s archive page (which I implemented with the Extended Live Archives plugin) and the search function, I think it’s not too difficult to find something on the site.
How do you organise your blog and what do you think of my honest-to-goodness geeky strategy?
