The last couple weeks I have been doing a lot of behind-the-scenes organizing/reorganizing of this web site. The biggest change has been with category pages. I’ve been adding different categories right and left lately, and at the moment there are almost 300 categories and subcategories to which articles can be assigned, each with its own category page like this one.
The problem I have with this site is a lot of times I have no idea where to put a particular category. For example, I’ve written a couple articles about Arnold Schwarzenegger in the past, and am likely to write a few more in the next few weeks, so lets go ahead and make a page just for the Schwarzengger articles. But where do I put Ahnuld? Since he’s best known as an actor, should he be somewhere in the Film category? Or since most of my comments about him deal with his political career, should he be sandwiched somewhere in the Politics section? Then again, Schwarzengger got his start as a body builder so maybe he belongs somehwere in the Sports section.
I’m not even going to waste any time debating this — I’ll just put the page in the Miscellaneous section and move it out of there if I ever suddenly see a compelling reason to slot it somewhere else.
Coversant lets me punt on these decisions now because it is extremely easy to relocate the page and create a redirect if I ever can make up my mind. For example, for a long time I had no idea where to put my 9/11 page, so it’s sat in the Miscellaneous category for almost two years. It finally hit me the other day that the best place for it would be as a subcategory in a Law–> Crime–> Terrorism page.
Moving it there and making sure that anyone who visits the old location gets redirected to the new location will take about 5 minutes.