I’ve been working on a personal project to standardize a bunch of things that I do on the dozen blogs that I occasionally write content on with the plan of starting to write more regularly across all of my sites.
As part of that cleanup, I once again realized that I have let category bloat creep across most of my blogs. I’ve let myself get in the habit of deciding that I want to write something, realizing that it doesn’t fit a category, and just creating a category for it.
I have a couple reasons for wanting to prevent this kind of category bloat.
- I want to move the categories section down to a fat footer at the bottom of my sites but that won’t work with 40 different categories for some sites.
- I want to stay focused so that I know what I want to talk about on each site.
Sometimes I try to think about what to write on sites and nothing comes to me. I think limiting the sites to something like 3-5 topics will help tighten the focus and actually make it easier to think about what to write about.
My plan is to have most of this infrastructure work (upgrades, code consolidations, banners, etc) by the end of the month so that I can start the new year all nice and organized. Part of that is going to be the horrible task of recategorizing several hundred posts on a couple of the sites. That will not be a fun project, but I’ll be happy when it is all finished.
Another perk of limiting the number of categories is that I’m considering doing some special CSS styling depending on the category. It might be as simple as a custom image somewhere in the post to something as extreme as a completely different look for certain categories but I only want to tackle THAT project if I only have a few categories on a site.
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Have you considered using subcategories? You could show only the top umbrella categories in your usual footer links. Instead of reorganizing individual posts, you’ll be shifting around groups of posts by redirecting a few categories. You could also add a column for recent posts from whatever category you want to feature.