Announcement: New Post Categories

In the wee hours of the morning this morning/last night, I did an overhaul of post categories on the blog. When I started out, I didn’t really see the purpose of categories versus tags, so I just made everything a category and had the tag cloud display categories. That was a workable solution at the time, but ultimately not scalable as anyone who saw the giant category list can attest. Over the course of time, I came to realize this but allowed myself to be a boiled frog until last night I said “screw it” and hopped out of the pot. I downloaded a helpful wordpress plugin so that I didn’t have to mess with the database directly and changed all of my existing categories to tags.

From there, I created a handful of more general categories that I feel reflect the broader categories of my posting. Some of them are obvious (.NET and Java) and others are named for running series of posts that I do (abstractions, design patterns, etc). I went rather tediously back through all of my posts and assigned them categories that seemed a good fit, though I must admit I didn’t spend a ton of time on the oldest posts. I also am generally trying to minimize the number of categories assigned to posts – one is ideal and some may occasionally be in two, but that’s really about it, I think. We’ll see. This new classification system is rather evolutionary, so I’ll adapt it as I make new posts and use it from here forward. If you have any issues with a post’s categorization, please feel free to comment in that post or to shoot me an email (erik at my domain).

Also, I should note that there is no loss of information. The previous categories are now all tags, so if you wanted to see all “WPF” posts for instance, you can go to https://daedtech.com/tag/wpf instead of https://daedtech.com/category/wpf. I’m hoping that in general this makes the site a little more readable and organized.