Blegh. I feel like taking the time out to type a long-ass wall of text, so if you don't feel like reading a long-ass wall of text you'd better go read one of my shorter posts cause this is going to take forever. Let me tell you what I've been working on lately. My site.
I've been sorting posts. Since I don't know when, this blog has been a pretty mess, you haven't been able to find anything. Right now it's probably easier to find stuff but it's still not good enough. It's like this blog was first a dark maze. Now I've removed the darkness but it's still a maze. Where there is light there is hope, but what's there to improve?
Categories and tags, the two basic fundamentals of a blog that let you find what you are looking for. Any blog that's trying to make money or gain a large audience will abuse the tag feature improportionately. They'll probably get a script that automatically tags their posts based on what's written in them. They'll probably abuse categories as well, and add a category for every topic they post about. I don't like long category lists or tag clouds with a hundred tags in them, I'd rather keep it simple. Their method probably works when people find the site through search engines, searching for one of the many tags or titles or topics they've transformed into categories, but it makes navigating the site itself a messy experience if you don't check the archives or brows post by post.
I decided to change the site structure completely. First I created a main category for the blog, then I created subcategories for the main topics of the blog. There's life, anime, movies, gaming & digital. Don't know about digital, maybe I'll change the name to computers or Internet or something smarter, but basically those are the blog categories. I'm going to turn all the other sections of this site into categories, and make all the pages on these different sections into posts. Did so a while back with the music page. It was the only section that already had tagged content out of the different sections, but earlier the music category was separate from the page, usable only to navigate the different tracks. So they've merged now. Just today I configured the main page so it shows posts from only one category, the one with site updates. So if you want to read blog posts, you need to go to the blog. There you can filter content through a small amount of categories, and in those categories I'm using tags to further filter content.
In this category, for example, there's 'Life' and there's 'Etcetera'. Life contains everything about me, Etcetera contains everything else. This is probably the biggest category within the blog so I chose to make tags for different content types. Quotes, Images, Photos, Videos & Sounds. The life category generally doesn't contain anything important, it's just me rambling about various events, so if you want to filter the media it's now an easy task. If you want to find posts that don't really have to do with me, that's an easy task. The other categories are much more content-oriented, here it's just one big stream of happenings and filters for content types.
Before I started working on this system I started creating tags for everything. All the different movies I had seen, all the anime series I had watched, games I had played, everything I'd posted about that could be considered a filter. With just a few posts in each filter, sometimes no more than one, that system becomes pretty useless. Not to mention it's hard to manage all the content with so many different tags. When posting something there's no way I'll remember to place the right filters on it. So I started adding a lot of tags, then I started removing the lot of them to make things smarter. I still don't know if I found the perfect system, but so far so good. I've gone through two categories and I'm working on the third (this one) right now. It'll take the week I guess.
I'd really rather be doing other things, but until the site is better organized it's hard to add new content without just further adding to the mess. Optimal choice would have been to have a better order right from the start and just keep going from there. If there's a structure to follow, it's easy to change the structure, if there is no structure, well yeah, it's messy like a soggy waffle. So anyway, that's what I'm all about right now. I'll keep you posted.