Clash of categories

A Tech article with Comments posted 26 February 2009.
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So, dear readers (and I’m looking especially at your, RSS subscribers), I have a question for you.

I have begun (and will happily continue) violating one of the cardinal rules of blogging: keep your blog to a single topic. As I figure it, there are at least five different things I post about on this website:

  • Computers and Technology
  • Free/dom Software
  • The Church
  • Politics
  • My Family

Often times these categories overlap. For instance:

  • Computers + The Church = Use of Technology in Ministry.
  • Freedom Software + The Church = Use of Freedom Software in the Church.
  • The Church + Politics = Denominational Politics in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
  • Politics + My Family = Why My Parents Were Silly For Voting For Barack Obama. (I haven’t actually written anything about this yet, but let me tell you…!)

So my question for you, dear readers, is this: what have you come here to see? Are you here for one or two of those particular categories, or are you looking for that particular blend of craftiness that is (ontologically speaking) Ted Carnahan? If you just want a category or two (e.g. Politics), do you care that other stuff (e.g. Sermons) is in the same feed, or would you actually switch to a category feed? Is this all so-much-naval-gazing, or does anyone actually care?

I’m serious – let me know what you think in the comments.

Viola! New Theme!

A Tech article with Comments posted 8 January 2009.
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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.