The New Is There Food - Categories

What started as a redesign of the site - another theme change - has resulted in something a little more extensive: a full on restructuring.

The categories have changed again. They didn’t really fit with the things I want to do with the site so they’ve been jiggled around. Before, I had:

Reviews - too broad. TV, film, music, games; it all ends up in here.

Site Specific - Not used all that often, and sometimes ended up being tech posts about new Wordpress updates.

Distractions - hasn’t been used for ages.

Thoughts - I was finding that everything really ended up in here. After all, what’s a blog’s content made up of if it’s not thoughts?

So, after some careful thought, and a look at my archives, we now have:

Personal - I intend to write some more personal things for the site. These wouldn’t have fit in any of the other categories.

Health - My gym updates (which I’ll admit have slowed a little, of late) will go in here. Light-hearted posts about my current state of well-being will probably also go here.

Tech - I tried to start a second tech blog, but that failed miserably. It makes no sense to try to write two blogs when I’m neglecting my “primary” blog. So tech will stay on Is There Food, and I’ll try to keep up to date with all the Apple stuff I used to post about.

Entertainment - And this is where everything else lives. Films, TV, games, music: it’s all going to sit inside the entertainment category.

Beyond that, I’m going to make better use of tags. If I write a review of a game, I’ll try to make sure it’s got the right tags on (”review” and “game”).

Using this approach, the site should make a bit more sense, and I can compartmentalise my posts better.

2.3 Upgrade Done

Is There Food is now running on the latest and greatest version of Wordpress: 2.3 aka Dexter (officially named after Gordon, but I prefer to think of it as Morgan).

Everything’s gone quite well, and I’m pleased to see that my existing theme is still working. K2’s latest release is calling to me, particularly as it now supports 3 columns in a slightly more elegant manner than the version you see here. However, it’s got lots of javascript and additional trimmings that the minimalist in me doesn’t really care for. I might do some tweaking soon though.

Tag migration went very well - I went from the Simple Tagging plugin to Wordpress’s shiny new built in tags with no pain at all. And Christine has kindly provided new tools for Dexter’s tagability.

Things appear to be slightly quicker, the built in plugin update notification is a really nice touch, and overall I’m impressed. Given that I feared for the future of Wordpress when they announced their tag intention (way to alienate all your existing users) the way the migration tools for the major tagging plugins have been included, and the way they seem to work pretty damn well, has left me with warm and cuddly feelings.

Great job Team Wordpress.

Tags

I've been reading about tags vs categories for a while now. Lorelle is a big fan of The Ultimate Tag Warrior - a Wordpress plugin which makes the creation and management of a tag based site (or folksonomy) less painful. I'd like to say easier, but transitioning from categories to tags when you've already got a reasonable amount of content isn't. It's not exactly hard either - it's just not something you can leap into without a bit of thought.

As a starting point, I had a look at Technorati and discovered that of the 100 most popular tags, there are only really a handful of top level ones that I write about. Things like Apple, Film, Music etc. Of course, there is a level of variation within these categories, for example any piece of content written about Apple could also be classed as Mac, Apple Mac, iBook, iMac, and more. Film could be film, films, movies, flicks, dvds: you get the idea.

Tags are intended to provide additional information about a post or piece of content. I like to think of it as meta-information, although that's probably just the geek in me. Tags enrich the pool of information you're searching through and hopefully make the search for that information easier. My view is that they're also useful for adding additional contextual information to a post. So, to use my recent Hills Have Eyes review as an example: its new category will be Reviews, plain and simple. Previously it fell under film, horror, and review. With a tag based approach I could use tags like remake, gore, horror, Aja, Craven etc. It appears (in the context of the web) to be more "acceptable", and my own view is that it's more usable, to apply large numbers of tags and fewer categories. My thinking behind the acceptability of tags is that this approach provides the reader with a choice: Do I want to chose from a larger selection of "meta" data about this post, or do I just want to know what its reason for being is? And so that's how it all sits in my mind: Reason for being = Categories, meta or contextual information about a post = Tags. A reader can then browse through my site either by moving from post to post via tags (so each post would be quite closely related) or by categories (which would take a broader view of posts with a similar intention or origin).