The Great Category Implosion of 2004 (8 Ways to Sunday)

The Great Category Implosion of 2004

Filed under “What's New” and “Blogging”
by Adam at 12:32 PM on November 14, 2004

Time for a little cleanup at 8 Ways to Sunday.

The Over-Long History of How Things Got Messy

Over the last year and a half that I’ve been blogging, a whole mess of categories has accumulated. I’d been careful about my selection of new categories and I don’t feel like I have any that are unnecessary, but the list in the sidebar was getting too long for visitors to easily navigate. When I upgraded to Movable Type 3.0, I changed my site’s URL scheme to something more “future-proof” by basing it on entry dates instead of categories. I handled the possibility of broken links from other sites with URL rewriting via .htaccess.

When I moved to WordPress I gained the ability to use sub-categories, but I didn’t go for it at first. I was concerned about breaking links to category archives, which would still be affected no matter how future-proof the permanent entries had become. I was too lazy to add even more cruft to my .htaccess file, already over 230 lines long.

What’s Changed

Well, I’ve finally grown sick of maintaining a long .htaccess file and of the slight (but noticeable) delay that redirection causes in page loading. I’ve notified all the people who sent me trackbacks before the URL scheme change that the posts they linked to have new locations. Now I’m free! Free to change categories with impunity! Woo hoo! [*ahem*]

Here’s what’s changed:

The Graphic Design, Web Design, Writing, and Photography categories are now collected under the Arty Stuff meta-category.
Blogging, Books, Movies, and Music are collected under Media.
Oddities, Question of the Day, and What’s New have been re-shuffled under Miscellanea.
Software and Technology & the Law are now filed under Science & Technology.

There now. Doesn’t that make more sense? One of the nice things about WordPress is that when you click on a major category, all the entries from its subcategories also appear in that category archive. This is much more intuitive than some other blogging systems that force you to put an entry under both its parent and sub-categories.

That’s enough anal-retentive housecleaning for one day. I’m off to play Halo 2.

Adam is a web developer and graphic designer who lives and works in south-central Kansas. He likes to speak his mind, both here and in his business blog. He only rarely writes about himself in the third person, honest. If you’d like to work with Adam, drop him a line.

8 Ways to Sunday