Whew! I’m really excited to announce that I’ve finally completed this project. It’s something that I’ve been wanting to do all summer, and I finally got it done in stages this past weekend.

So what exactly did I do that warranted the “Please pardon the dust” warning to be posted on top of my blog all weekend? Well, for awhile now, I have been somewhat unsatisfied with my blog’s categories, which have remained relatively unchanged since the last time I relaunched this blog back in October 2006. Back then, the scope of my blog was much more limited, and so was the scope of my categories. I didn’t know I’d be frequently posting videos here from YouTube or Comedy Central, or that I’d occasionally be writing reviews of things or blogging about non-techy stuff, or things like that. The concept of “tags” hadn’t made its way to WordPress yet, and I didn’t even start using tags on my blog until about a year ago.

So for this project, I went back through all of my blog posts, deleted the 25 posts that preceded January 2007 (they weren’t that good anyway, very out of date, and there were very few of them), and then set about making changes to my categories to better reflect my blog content, and to differentiate them from tags. For the most part, tags will be more topical, while categories will be more, well, categorical. (Which is the whole point of “categories” vs. “tags” in the first place, for any blog.) Then, I went through every single one of my 359 posts and manually edited the categories for them to fit into the new structure, since I still value most of my older content on this blog.

You can now see my refurbished set of categories on the left. You’ll notice one thing that I’ve done is I’ve organized some related topics into subcategories. There are also a few new categories on here. The “Going to College” category is going to be focusing on my efforts through the next school year to apply to and get into college–anything major that I do to enter college (or any tips that I discover along the way) will be blogged about this year and appearing in that category. I’m also hoping to feature more guest bloggers on Webmacster87.info from time to time, and the new “Guest Bloggers” category will help those stand out. The “In My Opinion” category will be for the longer blog posts that I make from time to time in which I express opinions about various things, and Tips ‘n Tricks will be for posts where I give tips about a particular subject. Since I found that I do blog a bit about issues that affect my state/country/the world, there’s a new “National/World Issues” category for those posts. Videos that I post now finally have their own subcategory under “On The Internets” (a clearer and more satirical name than “On The Intarweb”) along with a few other new subcategories. And under the Personal category, there’s a new “My Travels” category to cover my itineraries and recaps of my various expeditions, and a new “Feedback Requested” category for posts where I ask for feedback, assistance, or advice from you, my readers for various reasons.

So I’m glad that I’ve finally accomplished this tedious task and can cross yet another item off of my summertime to-do list!

Tags: categories, project, Webmacster87.info