Blogger's Secret

Do your categories still make sense?

Categories that were designed with the best of intentions at the beginning of a project can go horribly askew. Do yours still make sense for what you are doing? You should be able to figure this out after the first month or so of continuous effort, and go back and re-edit to put things where they belong.

Take the approach that each category needs to be thorough enough to capture everything that you have written on a broad topic, but not so comprehensive that every narrow topic gets its own category.

How many categories do you need? As a rule of thumb, plan to have at least one post per month for each category that is in season. A cooking weblog with a "Juneberries" category can be excused to only have three annual posts - one planning the season, one describing what happened, and one in January remarking on eating something preserved for the year; but you might instead consolidate it with your "Blueberries" category to make a "Berries" category that has more heft, and a longer season, and more reason to write every month.

If everything you write fits into only one category, maybe it's time to start a new blog that focuses on that topic.  That's what I did when a few posts about library systems turned into my Superpatron weblog, which in time led to some travel and speaking engagements. Some of the topics that I brought up that would never have attracted any attention as part of my general weblog, but were consistently on-target for a specific audience that appreciated the attention and the thoughfulness focused on a single topic. When you set boundaries, you get the freedom to explore within those boundaries and ignore what's out of scope.

Book cover: George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind.

Thanks to Chris Lovie-Tyler for the discussion of boundary-setting.

Reorganizing your thoughts

If you write for long enough, you may find that your collection of words no longer matches your collection of categories. It's good practice to rebalance your categories with your writing periodically, creating and destroying categories so that they reflect the current view of what you are trying to discover or say.

Categories as a source of inspiration

If your blogging software supports categories, you should be using it to help you track what you are writing about. Divide up the world into some number of roughly equal sized buckets, and go back to each one periodically to refill it.

It's easy to get too many categories, and equally easy to have too few. The best way to manage categories is not to get too worked up about whether something is precisely in the right place; there's no way to be perfectionist about categorization and also write enough. 

My preference is to create too many categories, and then to use them as memory jogging devices so that I know some large set of things that I might want to write down, even if I don't care to keep each one of them updated frequently. If you know that you are capable of publishing something useful on each of a bunch of subtopics in a weblog, then you never need be completely stumped when it's time to write. Work your way down the list until either you see something you'd like to expand upon, or until you note that something is missing that you have an idea about how to fill it.