Categories

So I finally broke down and decided to implement Movable Type’s categories on my blog.Let me stop immediately and say that I am not at all interested in using my blog as any kind of knowledge management system. The software is simply inadequate.

At the same time, to the extent that I or a reader is interested, I think minimal searching and minimal organizing of my entries could be useful.

More importantly, categories allow me to implement some useful functionality in my blog.

For example… I’ve decided to go ahead with my Uberman Sleeping Schedule proposal without further delay. I think it would be interesting for later research to jot down what I am feeling and thinking as I embark on this ridiculous experiment. However, if I was to blog everything that I’m noting, my entries would get very boring, very quickly: “I went to bed at this time, I ate this, I felt this…”

When I was researching this polyphasic sleep stuff, the blogs I discovered were just very dry and uninteresting. That’s not something I want to burden a reader with.

However, I DO think that someone who is interested will want to read my log to see where I have trouble or to amuse themselves with my suffering. Therefore, I’ve decided to blog my Uberman Experiment, but so as not to use those entries as an filler material for the main blog, I’ve assigned them category: “Uberman”

On the main Log page, all entries without Uberman as a category are displayed (I.E. boring stuff is filtered out)… Additive vs. Subtractive Filtering in Movable Type is a topic for a different post… It’s not elegant, by any stretch of the imagination. But hey, it works, it works well, and beggars mustn’t be choosers.

to see the Uberman entries, a reader would need to go into the archive page (that now lists Favorite Entries, Archives by Date, and Categories and click on the Uberman link… Then, a new page displays all the entries that have Uberman as a category.

this is satisfactory for now, considering that there are few entries… later, presuming I get through enough days, I’ll need to customize further so that a reader will have acceptable page load times.

At any rate, despite the pleading email a friend sent me to NOT attempt Uberman’s, the bizarre behavior is motivating this change to the blog, which, in the long run, will be useful.

Todos:
– Get category stuff into all indicies and archives (ex. if you click on a date archive, then the category is not displayed and no filtering occurs)
– Fix Category Link on Entries to be more like “Show Similar Entries” rather than a static link to the archive page
– Go through and reassign _NONE’s to proper categories