February 25, 2006

To Analyze and Categorize

Now that I’ve got Blog categories working fine via WordPress (or vice versa :p) and the Heat Map plugin is doing an excellent job of displaying a tag cloud (or at least simulating one), I decided that it was time to do one more thing – go through all my old entries and re-categorize them to reflect the actual subject matter.

Since none of my old entries had categories assigned, it was easy enough. All I had to do was make the default category (General) count zero :p Of course, in order to actually do this, I had to go read all of my old entries, find the categories that they belonged to, create the categories if they weren’t there and then add the categories to the entries. This meant that I basically had to do a lot of reading of my own old entries.

I did learn a few interesting stuff about how I used to do things :p It looks as if I wasn’t as compulsive about entries in the past as I am now. But it also looks as if I was a lot less controlled in what I wrote. There were a lot more introspective entries where I would just talk out loud to clarify my thoughts and there certainly was a lot more about what was going on with me on a day to day basis. And there was a lot more soapboxing too :p

It looks as if I have gotten too busy (or a bit more reserved) nowadays. I hardly ever talk about stuff going on in real life any more and I don’t do that much of reflective writing (at least not the soul searching variety). Even my comments on movies used to be much more reflective whereas now, it’s more descriptive but not does not go into so much detail about the ideas behind the movie. Not sure if the changes are a good thing but they certainly are there 🙂

Of course, now that categories have become that much more important, I have started thinking about how Blog can be improved to utilize categories. One idea is to have a way to navigate entries not just by date but also by category. I’m not exactly sure how to implement this yet – perhaps a tab panel where the calendar currently is so that you can switch between calendar and category views? – but I do want to look into a method to do this. The other thing is to have a hierarchical category view so that you can have a bunch of categories under another category – for instance, movies, books, television and music under entertainment. WordPress supports such a hierarchy but it does not affect how things work beyond the categorization itself. In Blog, I simply want it for ease of organization and for ease of access to different categories. Again not quite sure how to implement it (without breaking any existing functionality that is :p)

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Posted by Fahim at 8:24 am  |  No Comments