Hey, you probably don’t pay attention to this stuff, but I sure as shit do and I’ve been ignoring it for a long time.
Here’s the TL, DR: I have restructured the categories of the blog. Now there are clear descriptions for each category. The tag system is going to get used too, to group types of blog material like Audio, Video, How To Be segments or major subjects I like to revisit.
Back when this blog started, back in 2013, oh wow, that’s a number alright, but when I did, I didn’t use the category system. At all! It was the wild west. I thought the categories were cute but it wasn’t like I needed to manage them, because what organisation would ever be usful for this tiny little blog? You could read a bunch of posts in a few minutes.
Then one day I realised I had to fix that because oh god, I had over five hundred posts on the blog. This also presented me with a new problem: You can add categories to posts in bulk. If you want to remove categories to posts, you have to do it one at a time. This meant going through every single post and individually toggling off uncategorised and assigning it a category. That was super annoying and I resolved to avoid ever needing to do that again.
Some things in the blog have come and gone. It used to be that I used a code tidbit at the bottom of every Game Pile post so you could click through a lot of game pile articles in a row. That’s neat, but I find that I forgot it easily, and it also was one of many small parts of the blog that could break easily.
In 2021, late August, I gave up on an older form of the WordPress content management, and I started using the Block Editor. I did this because Fox was using it at work and my classic editor was starting to get shaky. When it comes to software breaking down over time, I know that things are going to get worse rather than get better, so I should move to the block editor for practice.
I’m still not quite done on that front.
This also required an update to the theme? That’s all back-end stuff that Fox, a web developer, took care of. There were some things in this that I still don’t know how I feel about. Like I need to go through all the posts that have like, images in them and convert them all to the block editor. That is tedious, but you know, it’s my fault for working on an ongoing writing project that’s now over two and a half thousand posts long.
It’s been a pain in the butt! And there’s been some discoveries too. Like, for example, if you delete a tag in wordpress, it just removes that tag from all your posts. That’s what I want it to do. If I delete a category, though, I get a different message that says do you want to delete this content.
That’s scary, though.
Turns out it’s just a bad prompt: If you delete a category, all the posts in that category are left alone. But it does think of the category as ‘content.’ So that’s a thing to know about.
What else, what else, what else…
Oh, yeah, there’s now simpler categories for D&D editions – 3e and 4e get their own tags, and D&D content that’s cross-generational doesn’t need the specificity. Some categories like the DLC Podcast and my ‘notes’ category have been moved. A lot of my ‘study’ posts have been moved to a work blog, and now the stuff that fit that space that remains gets to be under the much broader ‘academia’ where I write about academic concepts.
This post is a ‘meta’ post – which is now much more clearly defined as ‘blog posts about the blog’ rather than ‘blog posts of me thinking about my general creative process.’
There’s also a category for ‘queerness’ because hey, I should admit I write about it for a reason.
Now, you might be going ‘oh that’s great, I really appreciate having the categories changed.’ Well, I did it two months ago. Same as the tags system. It’s been on for a while, and so has the updated theme. I don’t think you should notice – unless you aggressively look at my category system? But if you have lost something you needed or used, let me know.