Related Miscellany, Why Do You Mock Me So?
By leelefever on May 24, 2007 - 8:24am.
As many of you know, the Common Craft site has gone through a major transition. It was migrated from Moveable Type to Drupal and received a nice new design. One of the outcomes of this has been a complete disruption of 3+ years of blog post categorization.
For years I used a tight set of 6 categories, like:
- Weblogs in Business
- RSS and Syndication
- Social Design
These aren't too bad, but still quite broad. Then I had a catch-all category called "Related Miscellany", to which 250+ post were attached.
The problem is that I'm using tags on the new site, and tag clouds for navigation. This means that all of the former categories turn into giant words in the tag cloud. You can imagine the appeal and inherent usefulness of a giant "Related Miscellany" tag in the cloud. It doesn't exactly highlight any ontological skill.
So, I must fix this situation and the only way to do so is to edit every post, remove old categories and add new, more relevant ones. I recently finished editing all 250+ posts in the "Related Miscellany" category and it's safe to say that I'd rather shave my neck with a cheese grader than have to repeat this process. Only 500+ to go!
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Tagging Automation
I think your move from broad categories to tags is a good one (seems more helpful to your readers).
Did you consider or tryout any automated tagging solutions for the articles?
I know that Tagyu is no longer with us, but you could do a reverse del.iciou.us application of their tags (find all tags anyone used in del.icio.us to bookmark each of your pages and then apply those to each entry?).
Just curious.
- Mike
Automation
Hey Mike, great to hear from you. I wasn't aware of the reverse del.icio.us lookup, though I'm not sure it's appropriate as I'm trying to be conscious about tagging the articles consistently and from the Common Craft perspective. I'm pretty sure that a majority of pages aren't in del.icio.us, but I have no idea.
Warning! Concepts enlarging...
I am new to the Common Craft blog, I've been lurking around for the past few weeks, so I'm approaching it with out a prior reference.
I am running into similar issues. I had to do a tag cull. Then I started thinking about the Tag Cloud, and how, on a conceptual level, the Tag Cloud is a textual representation of my cognitive process from the last few months or so. It was kind of neat.
For aesthetics, I prefer fewer tags, but I think I'm going to start saving images of my tag clouds every month, and then when I have 6 months, I'm going to compare the images and watch how it moves over time.
Glad to finally come out... :)
Cheers
Charlene
Welcome Charlene!
It's a pleasure to have you "come out". I hope we'll be seeing more of you around these parts!
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