Some major and minor site updates.
Categories
I finally took the plunge and reworked my categories to be more manageable. One goal was to have a smaller category list for the sidebar. Another was to limit posts to being in only one category, for search engine optimization purposes. So I’ll put posts in the most appropriate category.
My apologies to everyone who received new pingbacks from old posts as I edited them to change the post categories.
Related Posts in Feed
I’ve added the add related posts to feed plugin, so that the feed will now have a list of related posts just like the post itself does. This should help feed subscribers who want to see an older article on the same topic, and will give me more backlinks if RSS thieves steal any posts.
Posting Frequency
I asked readers how many posts per day were too much earlier, and what I ended up deciding to do was to have one content post each day. A content post is one that is on topic and useful. This site update is not a content post.
So you’ll see one or two posts a day, with one of the posts being on topic.
That’s about it. Let me know what you think about the final list of categories.
Its good to see that your categories are now all cleaned up and they look good! I think its a good idea to keep posting frequency to a max of 3 per day. Sometimes, if an interesting story comes up I go ahead and write about it but usually i keep it at 2-3 per day myself.
Glad you like the new categories. The next time I start a blog I pick categories ahead of time. It’s a pain to cleanup later.
I agree with the posting frequency. My wife asked me why I was doing more than 1 a day, since that’s using up good post ideas more quickly. I hadn’t thought about it quite like that!
Jay
I need to do this, too: rearrange the categories. I think there has been confusion between technorati tags and blog categories. I’m using blogger, which doesn’t distinguish between the two. I like having multiple keyword/tags on technorati, and don’t want to lose that.
What has worked with one specific tag for me (“recipes”), was to create a separate blog post with an index to those posts, and then to try to keep it up to date. I need to do this with the other major categories, too.
I hope this allows me to have the best of both worlds: tags searchable on technorati, and a few useful categories (rather than 100’s with just one item in each).
The index post idea should work well, and provides a bit more internal linking which will help with your search engine results positioning.
I probably need to think about using a plugin to insert Technorati tags directly into posts, to widen the number of tags my posts have. It’s just a bit low on my priority list right now, with fall semester coming up fast.