A Categorical Imperative: The Importance of Using Specific Blog Categories

Can you even imagine a pun that is more high-brow than the one I just used in this post's title? (I certainly Kant.) But fear not, this post is not about deontological philosophy, it's just about categories. On this blog. And how important it was that I started using them effectively.

You see, I realized last week that my long-and-growing list of Categories and accompanying tag cloud (see left) was becoming unwieldy and largely unusable. Chris Pearson's recent post on the importance of keeping categories trimmed to avoid provoking analysis paralysis in your blog visitors really hit home and I decided to do just that.

And so from my old, never-ending list of 100+ labels, I pored through every post and pared them back to just three, which coincide with this blog's three main themes: productivity, persuasion and prose. (I also added a few others like "technology" to denote the tech-heavy productivity posts and wordplay-wednesdays and marketing-wednesdays to set apart my ongoing series.) But the main purpose here was to create categories that were actually usable.

Finally, my categories are specific and few enough to truly be used as navigational devices,  which Pearson advocates, rather than just a (pretty, but ultimately) useless cloud of stream-of-consciousness spouting.

Next, I went to work, looking for ways to leverage my newly trimmed categorical list in a way that would help my readers.

Enter the new navigational bar.

Yeah, My Blogger Blog Has a Nav Bar Now, What's It To You?

As you may or may not have noticed, Smithereens is sporting a spiffy new navigational bar across the bottom of the header (if you're on the site and missed it, scroll back up and admire, or if you're reading this in a reader, click on through and check it out.)

Now this may not seem like a very big deal, but the lack of easy nav bar implementation on Blogger blogs is a notorious shortcoming of the platform. It took some serious template tweaking to get it working. (Oh and if the header looks horrible to you, instead of slick and seamless, you're probably using IE version 6 or earlier. Why are you doing that? It's time to upgrade to Firefox. Or at least get IE7+ for the love of standards-compliant browsers! But if you're not on an antiquated browser and it still looks funky, please let me know in the comments as I'm trying to quash the last of the template bugs as quickly as possible.) 

But what's important about the new navigation bar (and relevant to this post) is the addition of the "Choose a category" buttons. Let me explain my rationale for adding these, and explain what it means for you.

The New Smithereens Blog Buffet (It's All-You-Can-Eat)

When I started this blog just 6 short weeks ago, I wasn't sure exactly where it would take me. I knew that my most passionate interests were (and still are) writing, marketing and general lifehackery, so I decided to set those three subjects (poetically paraphrased as productivity, persuasion and prose) as my basic slalom poles, to use a skiing metaphor. 

But one thing I have noticed recently is that having such an eclectic subject base can cause splintering among my readership. For example, the readers who were most enthralled with my Twitter Wit Writing Contest are not the same as those who drove my gadgety iPhone scoop post to 600 Diggs and beyond.

The problem came to a head when I started to feel as though posting about productivity and technology was putting off those who were more interested in writing or marketing, and vice versa. As the saying goes, you can't please everybody all of the time, only some of them, some of the time.

And so, I felt like I had to do one of three things to fix this issue: 

1) Split the blog into two - one on productivity/technology/gadgets and one on writing and persuasion, 

2) Narrow the focus of my blog down to just one or the other and stop writing about some of the things that interest me; or 

3) Provide mored ways for readers to dynamically choose what content they consume. 

After consulting with many of my trusted friends who've been blogging much longer than I, I decided that the third option was the best idea for now. (I don't have the time to properly maintain two personal blogs right now on top of client obligations, and I don't want to limit the scope of my writing just yet.)

And so, dear readers, now you can choose exactly which type of smithereen you want to take in on any given visit, and which you'd rather ignore. It's a buffet of useful ideas and now you can skip the salad bar and load up on dessert at your leisure. 

If you like gadgets and productivity but could care less about how to differentiate tricky homonyms, click the Productivity tab (which also encompasses technology articles) and go to town. If you entered the TwitWit contest 3 times (I'm looking at you, washwords), but all the iPhone chatter drives you batty, click the Prose tab, and maybe the Persuasion one, and enjoy reading only the content you want to read. 

Or if you're eclectic like me, and like all kinds of subjects, then...well... carry on. As you were.

But what about the many of you who follow my content by RSS or email? You're thinking: 'What do I care about all this? I never even go to your site.' (Thanks a lot.) Well don't worry, I thought of you too.

Brand Spanking New RSS Options, As Well

As of right now, not only can you get your Smithereens fix in subject-specific morsels on the site, you can also get separate post updates for free for any of the 3 categories. 

This endeavour took a bit of Blogger hackery as well, and I am writing up a brief tutorial to post later tonight in case others are wondering how to do this, but the point is, you RSS addicts now have options too, so it was worth it: 

For the Productivity feed, click here.

For the Persuasion feed, click here.

For the Prose feed, click here.

And of course, for the regular all-for-one-and-one-for-all feed, you can just click here. 

I hope you find these tweaks helpful, and a good alternative to splitting the blog up into different sites. But what do you think, will you use the new Categories for navigation, or not? Let me know in the comments, I really appreciate the feedback.

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By the way, I know there was more silence than usual these past few days - I hope you'll understand. Along with the many changes I've been making to the Smithereens template, navigation and feed architecture, I've also added a couple neat plugins, like the informative contextual popups you can see in this post from Apture (an article on this service is forthcoming, too - very neat implementation.) 

As well, I've been knee-deep in preparation for the launch of my first client blog for NewHomeAssociation.ca, an innovative company in Ottawa that is aiming to be the MLS for new home listings. It should be live tomorrow and I will update this post with the address so you can check it out.