The Grove

I took the time tonight to browse old posts according to category, in the hopes of remembering what the missing categories might have been called. After staring at the screen a lot and searching for what each group of posts had in common, I did finally remember. Two of the categories were named for blogs that got folded into this one: ‘Gryphon in the Wild’ and ‘Gryphon Looks Out.’ A third was called ‘Technoid’ because the posts dealt with the crunchy bits of some computer topic. The fourth was an old iteration of ‘Site Admin.’ I’ve now added the missing categories, reassigned the posts, and deleted the ‘Lost Category x’ series.

While I was at it, I re-categorized some of the posts. My scheme has changed over time and it was a chance to retrofit the changes over at least some of the posts.

Now that I have that straightened out, I need to find some other mischief to work. Hmmm. WordPress has posted a beta version of the next release….

-= G =-

I finally got around to exporting the posts from the old Geocaching blog and moving them here. It took a while because the blog ran under an old version of WordPress that did not support export. Soooo…. it had to wait until I felt motivated to upgrade the blog to the current version to export the posts so I could delete the old blog. But it’s done. The old posts are now here under the old categories. I’ll leave an anchor post in the old blog until I feel energetic enough to write a redirect to make it come here automatically.

-= G =-

One thing I noticed when my category titles vanished is that it happened right around the time tags became all the rage. I’m not sure when WordPress ramped up its support of tags, but I would not be surprised if the upgrade that ate my category titles was one that added new support for tags. I’m sure this was not intentional, and it may have been coincidental, but the timing is interesting. In any case, I am taking the hint. WordPress has a handy two-way tag to category to tag converter, and I have used that to change the known categories to tags. The lost categories can stay categories until I decide what to do with them.

I can also decide what I think of that tag cloud in the right sidebar. It certainly makes clear which tags hang on the most posts. However, the engineer in me thinks it’s an ugly and unbalanced way to present the data. While the tags are in alphabetical order, the varying text sizes make it harder to look for a specific tag. The concept seems more of a marketing tool, designed to focus attention on the most popular tags. This sounds like typical shallow materialism — if there’s more of something it must be better (or more important). Since it’s my blog, I can do as I please with the tags and categories. I’ll be playing with the concept to learn more about it and perhaps make it work better to my own needs. We shall see.

-= G =-