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Viola! New Theme!
A Tech article
with View Comments posted 8 January 2009.
Tags: aside, categories, freedom software, git, open source, tags, theme, vigilance, wordpress
I just got done implementing the Vigilance theme for my blog. I had started out working on my own theme, but I am a terrible designer and my site was very… iffy. With a very few minor modifications, though, Vigilance is working great. I blame Dean for the idea.
Rather than tossing all my ideas and starting over, though, I was able to easily pull in some of the key features I wanted to keep. You’ll notice below this post is a blue bar and no title. That used to be a full post under my old design, but it was always intended to be an “Aside” – a quick, one-off comment like you might find on Twitter or another microblogging service.
It was also easy to modify the template to do away with categories. With the advent of native “tags” in WordPress, I began to feel like there were two overlapping systems of navigation imposed on the site. “Hmm… I might write about this again. Do I make this a tag? A category?” The only compelling argument I could think of for retaining categories was that categories would allow users to subscribe to subsets of my site through RSS feeds. However, almost nobody who reads my site did that, and I didn’t want the hassle. I decided to ditch the categories and stick with tags, as they give a little more freedom and granularity.
Other than a few tweaks to my widget bar, a few color changes, and some custom images for the site, little has changed on the inside. But it sure is a lot shinier, and I think it’s a good platform for working on new stuff in the future. I also got a chance to play with the git version control system, which is slowly enticing me away from Subversion. Thanks to Jestro for the excellent, open source, freedom software theme.
Copyright 2006-2010 Ted Carnahan. Except where noted, the content of this site is licensed under CC-SA-BY.
Wow, love the new theme!
Re: tags and categories though, I’m a huge fan of the dual approach. First of all, there are individual feeds for each tag (e.g. http://www.tedcarnahan.com/tag/wordpress/feed/). Second, I view Categories as more permanent entities, tags as more fleeting. Categories are meant to be listed, tags to be searched.
So, for example, ‘ubuntu’ or ‘gnu/linux’ or ‘wordpress’ would be tags (no matter how often I write on the topics), but ‘Free Software’ or ‘Free Culture’ is the category. I have a few categories setup on my blog as my general streams of thought, and then I just use tags as more specific descriptors.
If you had to choose between the two, definitely, tags, but I really like the dual approach, even if it sort of came about by accident.
I was utterly unconvinced of the value of having categories (and thereby more feed options) until I visited your blog today. When I clicked to subscribe, I got this beautiful little drop down list of different category feeds to choose in addition to “All.” I don’t relish the idea of coming up with categories, but the user experience was impressive. I’m rethinking this.
Thanks! Though, to be honest, you could still do that with tags. That was a manual edit I made to the header to highlight the most important categories. Those category feeds could easily be tag feeds.
I guess I just find the categories a nice high-level way of answering the question, “what is this blog about?”
It’s pretty slick, though. And I suspect that there are a few people who would like to get the tech-y stuff without the church-y stuff or vice versa. I just need to pick categories which are broad enough to be comprehensive but not too numerous. Ah, the difficulties of moderation…