Finished moving myself, The Blarg and Mike over to the new host. We’ve got lots of space and bandwidth so just have to find something to do with it. If anyone is getting tired of their Blogger or WordPress.com blogs and wants more flexibility I can hook you up. Blogger’s commenting system sucks so I would be happy to help migrate any converts.
New hosting and domain transfer
I got fed up with the poor performance and stability of ResellerZoom’s server so I’m jumping ship over to Lunarpages. $2 less a month for a much better environment. I’m transfering my domain registration over to them since they’ll renew it for free for life. This might lead to some downtime but fear not I’ll be back.
Tags and Categories
Tags have become a big part of WordPress. Back in the day we had categories and that’s it. A user could search the site for keywords, but categorizing a post couldn’t be accomplished without a ton of categories. Recently I added a bunch of categories, reassigned my posts into them and ended up with a lot of categories with only a few posts in them. I had been resisting the movement towards tagging and wanted to hold onto my categories. In WP 2.5 tags have been integrated into the core and it is clear there is a role for tagging.
The main issue I was having with categories is that I was using them to say what a post is about. For example, if I had a post about our wedding, it went in the Wedding category. But once our wedding was over I had like 10 posts sitting in a category that would never be added to. With tags I can place those posts into “Life Stuff” and tag it with wedding. The category becomes a general bucket and the tags describe exactly what the post is about.
I’ve made some theme changes and added a list of tags on each post. I went back through all my posts, recategorized them into my core categories and added tags. Now I have 8 categories and over 100 tags which will be much easier to manage and will keep me from trying to stuff my posts into overly specific categories.
Fixed one of the cardinal sins of web usability
You might have noticed links look different on my site. I had them styled without an underline for a long time and I realized I need to practice what I preach. Some usability issues came up at work recently and articles I read made me reevaluate my own site. The most glaring usability infraction were my link styles. I had removed the underline and bolded links because it looked good. Bold text is normally used to add emphasis, but I changed that to represent links to other content. When it comes to usability, changing an accepted and widely understood standard is simply unforgivable. End users might not pick up on things like this, but it can impact their experience in a very negative way.
I Banish Thee Category “Uncategorized”
I went through my posts and found that more than half of them were simply dumped in the “Uncategorized” category that comes with WordPress. I realized that I didn’t like my categories and they were actually obstacles to me posting. I went through and added categories for what I had posted and want to post about in the future. I ditched a few and added catchall categories like “Life” and “Geek” to cover some of those miscellaneous posts. Also any post with a picture I took got stuck in “Photography”. I guess my New Year’s resolution for 2008 is to make my blog more interesting and cover more topics that I enjoy. For example, I love movies, but it seems I haven’t posted once about them. The Movies category is empty and having it there will encourage me to post on that specific topic.