Lately I’ve been all on fire about my blog. I’m not sure why. These things come in spurts. Originally I was going to redo a whole theme, but I am really happy with Gemini Blue (and am making constant tweaks, for things such as the mood/music, previous/next links when viewing single posts). Since I’m no longer going to be doing a full-on redesign, I figured I’d toss my energies at the next big task I want to tackle.
I’m going back through every post and adding categories, and basically re-reading every post in the process.
When I mentioned this new task to Carlos, his reply was “OMG”, which seems pretty apt. Currently, there are 587 posts on this blog (well, 588 once I hit Publish on this one). I’m up through about 70 posts, and I’ve created somewhere on the order of 53 new categories. Before, there was only General and Moblog. Now, there’s a whole ton more, including hierarchies – for example, a master Gaming category, with subcategories for video games, board games, and MMOs — which I realize are potentially a subcategory of video games themselves — and then subcategories there such as for World of Warcraft.
I’ve gotten through about 70 posts so far, which puts me at Valentine’s Day in 2003. I’ve noticed some trends, so I thought I’d make a few observations.
- I used to talk a lot more about my faith. I wonder if this has waned because my faith has waned some, or because I’m aware of having a larger audience and I don’t want to alienate in some way, or what it could be.
- I wrote an awful lot about search results that brought people to the site. Since things were still relatively small compared to now, it was amusing to see what brought people in. I have to say, posting phrases like “Digimon Porn” will really boost your traffic. For the curious, currently my top search phrases are things like “Ironforge Airport” due to my screenshots of the area in WoW, “Crazy eBay Mom” from all those pictures I’d hosted that got a crazy huge surge of traffic (1.25TB — yes, that’s terabytes) back in May of 2005, and variants on “Skype vs. Gizmo” as Gizmo did link to my post reviewing the two products for quite awhile. “Brian Arnold” also gets a lot of people, as I’m usually somewhere in the top five results for my own name, one of which is usually the Rotten Tomatoes listing of the reviews I did for DEN. Technically, “hello” is showing up as my top search word, but I’m fairly sure that’s a result of a gob of bots attacking the comment system on my Gallery 2 installation.
- For some reason, I think that the tone in my posts sounds a little younger. I mean, I was younger, but I don’t know if I’m mentally skewing that somehow. It’s kind of hard to be objective when reading your own work, even if it is a few years old.
- I feel like my writing has evolved a bit. I don’t want to sound conceited, but I do seem a bit more confident in newer posts. Of course, once again, this could just be unintentionally skewing things.
- I enjoyed working out. I really need to remember that.
It’s weird to realize that I’ve got posts all the way back to July of 2002. That’s not really all that long ago, but it’s a lot of writing. I’m really glad I’ve kept this blog up as long as I have, and that I’ve resisted the urge to dump it all at times, or the urge to go back and selectively edit things. It’s all still there, untouched. Well, maybe not untouched, as I’ll admit to having corrected a spelling error once so far in the process of the retagging, as well as leaving a edit comment in another post for the heck of it.
That’s 70 down, only another 577 or so to go. This is going to be an interesting journey. I plan to document more reflection as I continue, so stay tuned.
When I imported my blog from Greymatter to WP I went through and did the category thang. On less posts, admittedly, but it was a fun use of an afternoon. The temptation to delete the emo whining was HUGE and I was thinking the other day I should just prune my categories down to “Emo” and “not emo” and let people choose their HP experience.
I think you are pretty!
muah!
:)
I’ve fallen in love with “tagging”, personally. I’ve found that using fewer, very broad categories and then tagging posts with what they’re actually about works better for me than having lots of narrow categories. Keeps the site cleaner too. I have a few categories listed down the side for things like “Movies and DVDs”, “Journal”, “Musings”, etc. On the Archive page I have a weighted tag cloud that lets people go at it a bit more finely.
I actually have a reorganisation project that keeps getting stalled, going through and redoing the Life of Convenience site. Bleh. It’d be nice if someone put together a WP web comic plugin that wasn’t a pain in the butt to work with (allowed for regular posts as “news posts” under each comic or on a seperate page, and showed only posts from the last comic rather than from the last week or the last however many posts, is that so much to ask?).
I’m really curious about the faith comment, if only because those things interest me (as you should know by now). Going back and reading some of those posts (thanks to the handy new categories!), I see what you mean. I find it especially interesting that some of the same conflicts you encountered back then are the same I’ve encountered, and how differently we reacted to them.
I guess I don’t really have a question or a definate comment to make about that, I just thoguht it was an interesting thing to say (the comment in this post) and I’m curious about what led you to say it. If that’s too personal or a taboo topic, that’s cool too of course.