Imperfect

goldilocks categorization

In The slow web, Fran juxtaposes blog posts and pages:

A blog post is short, fast, dated, (mostly) complete, and sent off to make its way in the world. Pages are longer-term, a work in progress, revisited, redone, curated, pondered.

I do think that static posts can act like dynamic pages and vice versa. However, Kelsey shows how that can get out of hand in I am really bad at categorization:

Having to then categorize these living, breathing blog entries (kept alive by my constant poking and prodding… erm “editorial decisions”) was an insurmountable problem. I’d oscillate between keeping everything uncategorized or creating too many oddly specific categories, the latter of which resulted in a deluge of information that defeated the purpose of making it indexable.

Categorization can be a great distraction from execution. More so if you try to clean everything at once instead of what you value or reference most. If "the cream rises to the top", start there and work your way down. That said, I wonder how the happy medium of creating categories on demand and maintaining only several categories would work. Like posts and pages above, even categories don't need to fall under either extreme: fluidity or rigidity. Goldilocks found the "just right" bowl of porridge, chair, and bed for her through trial and error. What level of categorization is "just right" for you?

Kelsey explains her impetus for categorization:

The average visitor probably wasn’t interested in comparing my URLs to my updated blog entry titles, but just knowing that they could was enough to make me self-conscious.

Even if few visitors will make that comparison, preempting that possibility in an easier way could save you trouble. I think of how often Lloyd publishes incomplete posts with an "in progress" disclaimer. Other disclaimers I have seen people use include "under construction", "to be continued", and even "my views have changed since I published this". Those measures seem like good compromises that don't fall into the failure modes of over-categorization, migration, or even deletion. With how temporary life is, how much permanence can you establish within it?

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