Curating my blog archive

The initial categories that I assign to my new blog posts quickly become stale while new patterns emerge. Ten years ago, I therefore created a “Contents” page with headings that better reflect these patterns.

Before

But the headings are too long (mostly 20 – 50 characters) for easy handling as WordPress tags or categories. On the other hand, without category pages, my hand-crafted post excerpts were almost invisible and unused.

Now finally I added the identifier numbers of my headings as WordPress categories, and put their long name into the category description.

So, now you can browse my blog archives via category pages and excerpts. You can even subscribe to individual categories via separate RSS feeds.

To facilitate even more overview, I wrote little summaries for the new categories. They condense much of my blogging, observations and insights of the last 18 years, so give them a try!

Furthermore, I identified ca. 40 % of the old posts as no longer recommendable, because their context has become obsolete or obscure. I did not assign them to the new categories, and greyed them out in the Contents page.

Now

Note that there is also another method of summarising that has not changed: If a major topic emerges from the post patterns, I collect snippets from many posts into a coherent longer text, and indicate in the Contents Page listing whether such a text (currently [1] – [3]) summarizes a given post. Tags don’t play a big role in my content provision.