Comments on: Viola! New Theme!

By: Ted Carnahan

Ted Carnahan — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 04:02:03 +0000

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…

By: Blaise Alleyne

Blaise Alleyne — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 08:33:08 +0000

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?”

By: Ted Carnahan

Ted Carnahan — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 04:31:58 +0000

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.

By: Blaise Alleyne

Blaise Alleyne — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 21:44:55 +0000

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.