Blog and Site Upgrades
I am still working on upgrading blogs, and I am in the process of moving one site to WordPress.
When I first started blogging, tags and multiple categories were all the rage. In fact, I was told at the time that I didn’t use enough tags, and it made sense in some cases to use multiple categories.
Tags
On the blog I began upgrading a week or so ago, turns out I have thousands of error messages – thanks to tags. Non existent tags. And I’m not talking one or two tags per post, either. No, I just had to go whole hog and come up with 6,7,8 tags per post. And some of these tags used the category name. It wasn’t enough for me to have a category, I made sure I had a tag with the same name as well.
I have to wonder now: what was I thinking? Who hit me over the head? I can’t blame booze – I gave that up in 1989.
I did some reading and learned that tags could get you in trouble SEO-wise. Oopsie! So I turned on no follow for those. I also learned that multiple categories weren’t the hottest idea for SEO either.
It seems I went whole hog on the multiple categories too.
Categories
Getting rid of categories in WordPress is easy. You can delete a category, and posts will either default to your default category, or stay in the categories you didn’t delete. This is fine if you’re only using 2 categories. But if you’re using a lot of different categories; you’re going to have a big confusing mess while you try to clean them up.
So, I went on a search to find a plugin to make my life a little easier. I found myself doing this a lot, actually. And I found a handy little plugin called Batch Cat.
Batch Cat
Batch Cat plugin allowed me to get a decent overview of just what kind of mess I had created. You pick a category, and a list comes up with all the posts in that category, but it also shows you the other categories the posts are in as well. You then decide to delete or move posts, and you can do it in groups. Lovely!
This image shows you what I’m talking about. It also illustrates my obsession with multiple categories.
The bottom half of the screen gives you an overview of all of your categories, number of posts in each cat. You select the category you want to either remove posts from, or assign posts to.
The Batch Cat plugin can also help you decide to get rid of those 1-2 post categories, thus helping in your organizational process.
Speaking of organization….
Years ago I created a website that I thought was a masterpiece at the time. It was simple – ugly, but simple and I thought highly organized.
Looking at it the other day brought me to another one of those What Was I Thinking? moments. Apparently, at the time, I thought I was an organizational queen. Now, not so much.
This site is a standalone static HTML/CSS site, handcoded page by page. No database involved. It uses server side includes. Heavily.
Server side includes are supposed to make a web designers life easier (not that I’m calling myself a designer, mind you.) I managed to use them in such a way that it created a rather large mass of confusion for the user. I gave up on inspecting the site and just started tearing it apart. It’s being converted to a blog. The farther along I get, the more amazed I become at my lack of organization.