Skip to content

Categories

David Nunez
David Nunez
2 min read

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

journal

David Nunez Twitter

Dir of Technology at the MIT Museum • Writing about emerging tech's impact on your life • Speculative insights on the intersection of humanity and technology 🤖

Comments


Related Posts

FCC's Vote against Net Nuetrality is a disservice to museums

Yesterday, the FCC voted to repeal the 2015 Open Internet Order and dismantle the order’s strong net neutrality rules (New York Times summary of what happened). You have probably read about how this might impact broadband quality for things like streaming television or even basic websites via tiered access

FCC's Vote against Net Nuetrality is a disservice to museums

Requiem for Rhinos - behind the scenes video

Automatically Unshortening Links in Wordpress Posts

On this site, I have the Broken Links Checker Plugin chugging away in the background. He tirelessly checks and rechecks every link in every post to find URLs that no longer work; pages sometimes just disappear. In most cases, I’m able to use the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to

Automatically Unshortening Links in Wordpress Posts