While preparing a different blog entry, I realized I was spending more than a few seconds to decide what category to put the blog entry under. I could use tagging instead of a category hierarchy, but I have doubts about whether any readers (the few that there are) would really spend the effort to select one of many possible buckets.
The problem as I see it, is trying to invent a categorization scheme that:
- Fits all my past, present, and future blog posts in an consistent, low-mental-effort way.
- Organizes my posts in a way that visitors care about and find easy to use.
Considerations:
- Having many categories makes it worse for both of the goals above.
- My life is dominated by computer technology (work and play)
- My small audience can be split between those from my personal network, and those coming from the Internet.
- The Internet audience mostly arrives via search engines, so they already know what they want; they’re highly varied in interests.
- My personal network, for the most part, is not as interested in computers as I am.
So I think going back to a two category split: “computers” and “life” seem appropriate names.
