It seems that at about the same time than me, Tom Coates is recategorizing his blog to extract his best entries into a best of category. Since my migration from Blogger last month, I’ve started doing likewise, though I’m not finished deleting the crap, fixing broken links and titles, wrapping quotes into blockquote tags, and generally speaking overhauling my archives so that they have better long-lasting value. Start identifying your best-of entries, and let’s aggregate them through a category trackback on some site. (Of course this is ripe for spamming, but self-declared quality might be worth tracking in Technorati.)
Here are a few thoughts so far related to my blog spring cleaning:
- If you don’t already do it, start using semantics now. Go for the low-hanging fruit: blockquote quotes, use at least a few categories (try to define them properly beforehand though), because some day you’ll want to do it and it will take you days to go back and redo it for all your old content.
- I’d like some posts not to be archived. They’re interesting as a passing notice, but two years later, it’s obvious they had no value past the transient homepage. Is there an MT plugin to do that on a per-post basis? I could use a specific category to do that, but I don’t care to change all my archive templates to filter it out.
- The “best of” category is only a start in categorization guided by hindsight. Other fun perspectives I could add might rate mood, tone, timeliness or clarity of vision, such as "passive-aggressive", "upbeat!", "self-righteous rants", "when I’m right, I’m right", "sign of the times", "meme laggard", or "I was wrong before anyone else."
- Going back in time, there’s an obvious emergence of patterns based on what what on my mind at the time (for instance, 2002 presidential elections in France) or in the general zeitgeist (say, corporate scandals). A way to make them explicit would be to map the most used category by month, quarter or year. I’ll probably do that when I have the time to.