Blog Post Category Trauma: How To Help Bloggers With Useless Categories
June 29, 2007 | By Lorelle VanFossen | Filed Under Blogging
Oh, my. It seems people are still having trouble with their categories. Here’s an example I found the other day:
- I’ve Been Thinking
- Some Blog Stuff
- More Blog Stuff
- My Thoughts
- About My Car
- Dreams and Wishes
- Useless Information
- Left Over Junk
Raise your hands. Who thinks these are effective post categories? Hmmm?
Instead of me telling you why these don’t work, you tell me.
Blog Post Category Trauma Article Series
- Blog Post Category Trauma: How To Help Bloggers With Useless Categories: The first post in a series on fixing your useless blog categories, and understanding why they are useless.
- Blog Post Category Trauma: Suggestions for Useless Categories: Part of the category trauma series, this showcases reader’s reactions to the first post featuring a bad list of blog post categories, and why they are bad.
- Blog Post Category Trauma: Fixing Those Useless Categories: Part of the category trauma article series, this looks at how you should work on rearranging and fixing bad category choices.
- Blog Post Category Trauma: Changing Your Categories in WordPress: The last post in the series on dealing with categories on your blog, specifically how to change them on your WordPress blog.
About the author: The author of Lorelle on WordPress, as well as several other blogs, Lorelle VanFossen has been blogging in one fashion or another for over 14 years, covering travel, nature and travel photography, web design, web theory and development, blogging, and WordPress extensively as web technologies developed. Lorelle is also the author of the fast-selling book, Blogging Tips: What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging, available in the new Blog Herald Bookstore. Lorelle will be speaking at WordCamp Dallas March 29-30, the Alliance for Distance Education in California Summit April 2-5, 2008, and the Successful and Outstanding Bloggers Conference May 2-5 in Chicago.
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You mean they’re no good?
1 - too vague, they don’t give any clues as to what is covered by them.
2 - The category title should be directly related to the subject matter.
does that about cover it (I’m just as guilty as the above of category vagueness but I’ve been thinking about sorting them out.)
Well, anything with thoughts or thinking in it is a bad category, as when is that NOT about your blog (your thoughts on technology, your thoughts on sport, your thoughts on politics etc.)
Useless information is well…useless (who’s going to search for that on google) and so is Junk. Blog stuff and more blog stuff - like thoughts - is pointless because everything on the blog is “blog stuff”. Blogging or site news would be better. (if they are on the same blog, it’s criminal)
I think it’s a matter of people using their categories as tags. It’s okay if you’re not much for organizing your blog posts under particular taxonomies. But if you’re strict with categorizing content as such, then I think categories should be more descriptive of the general topics of the blog posts under them.
These categories are no good because they’re redundant. They could be consolidated into two categories: My Thoughts and My Car.
If you wanted to get really strict, all of the categories could be wiped. This person’s blog is obviously a collections of thoughts, useless junk, and leftover stuff.
You all are on the right track. A couple big reasons are being overlooked, along with more little ones.
Well, if you are the kind of blogger who actually post “Useless Information” or “Left Over Junk” then I find it mighty nice of you to make sure I don’t accidentally stumble over it by putting it into a separate category.
I am especially fond of the “I’ve Been Thinking” category. First of all thanks for sharing, but perhaps you should have been thinking a little longer or about something else as well.
Apparently is this blogging thing harder than it looks :-)
Aiks? I posted this on the 29th too — How much time to you spend on your categories?
I’m learning a lot from the Blogging Tips book, so that’s why I’m sharing it :)
I can see everyone’s point of view here but I also think that individuals should have free reign on their blogs. If the person’s blog I am reading is someone I like or have interest in, of course I am going to read the “I’ve Been Thinking”, “My Thoughts”, or “Dreams and Wishes.” I think that blogs should be less about legalities or bad category names and more about people sharing information with the world.
I think I’m using worse categories then with “rants”, “food”, “bragging rights”, “pleasure” and other obscure categories. But I guess it really depends on whether you’re running a personal blog or a business or a paid blog.
[…] Blog: Why web writing rocks - “you don’t need anyone’s permission” … The Blog Herald: Lorelle helps bloggers clean up their categories (seriously, now: “Some Blog Stuff”? […]
I sorta see the problem with the example categories, but it also makes me question whether some of my own Blogger labels (like humor, opinion, charity, and food, for instance) are too generic…
Well… its a blog… about stuff. If you cant put stuff into a blog then what have you got?
Some of them overlap like these two pairs:I’ve Been ThinkingMy ThoughtsandUseless InformationLeft Over Junk
[…] Blog Category Trauma. […]
If I can’t go to a search engine and type in the word or phrase and be certain that I’ll find the type of information that I’m looking for then it’s not a good category.
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Only clear headings that mean something are ever going to get looked at, even if the information under the heading is usefull it is wasted if described as ‘My thoughts’. For all I know it could be about anything and totally irrelevant.
[…] your blog, and search terms and keywords, check your blog’s tags and categories. Are they all search terms and keywords that help people find content on your blog and with search engines? Do they really represent what you blog […]
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