Improving Ways to Read While Writing

flickr typewriter typo?!

I have been doing a bit of writing lately, and might even get an article or two published in an online technical publication. Which led me to thinking about the separation between technical stuff I write, often close to my profession, and the more personal items I write at other times. There are bits of photography and music in here too.

Many successful blogs stick to one subject, and treat it well. Some bloggers who want to scratch several itches therefore launch several blogs. I’ve always preferred one place to do everything, especially given that I don’t create anything like a useful volume of work to really get a following going anywhere in a given niche subject. I quite like the notion of an eclectic mix, and that has been my sub-heading ever since this blog was launched.

I may gain from better categorisation and taxonomy (tagging) though. Good categorisation allows a visitor to find related content easily. It may also allow separate blog entry points with navigation options per category. Perhaps I should code a top navigation with a few main category entry points (tech, photography, music & film…) which would allow different “views” of my blog based on different interests. I’m not exploiting that enough. Good tagging of each article creates little bridges between articles that share particular keywords. With WordPress you can assign multiple categories and tags to each article. Restricting the number of each you use makes all articles have tight interlinking which is good. Using lots of different tags and categories may cause the interlinking to be too spread out. This causes attrition on the usefulness of tag and category efforts in the first place.

In this blog’s case, after several years without any tags and a few set categories, I will have to go through all the old articles and reclassify them for any new taxonomy / categorisation to really work. What do you think about mixed-up blogs? Do you ever even look at blog navigation and try to find more content that is like the article you most liked on a blog?

6 Comments

  1. I agree with you about the eclectic mix blog. I throw whatever I want into every post. It’s not just about cats, or politics, or science… it’s about everything I find interesting.

  2. fruey

    12/3/2011 at 8:34 pm

    Cube,

    I agree with you on the “everything I find interesting” though the risk is that people see the first article on the page and say “this blog isn’t for me”. I’m working on a menu at the top of the screen which will indicate the subjects I talk about. It will also allow direct access to those articles people with tastes different from mine might rather read.

    Not sure when I’ll go live with it, got to get the design to a point I’m happy with first.

    Cheers,
    -Fruey

  3. I personally think it might be better to start a separate technical blog. You will eventually need a separate navigation for all the technical topics too, so I am not sure how you would do that if you mix everything together on the same blog.

  4. fruey

    11/4/2011 at 11:05 am

    You’re probably right Wibu, I’m leaning in that direction myself. However given the low output I have on any given niche, I might be better being a guest blogger here and there maybe, and keeping this blog reasonably eclectic but never too niche or technical.

  5. If you decide on separate technical blogs you might find a domain name with a term you want to rank for in the search engines – this might help your rankings.

  6. fruey

    18/4/2011 at 10:42 am

    Yes – in fact I have a couple of connections with interesting domain names, I think that guest writing on their blogs might be a better starting point than another web blog about tech-geekery.

    Cheers,

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