My friend, Cathy, is troubled. She wants better categories on her blog but she’s stuck.

It’s got me thinking about the rold of categories on a blog. I was going to reply to her but decided to post it here. I’d like to see if any of you would like to contribute to these thoughts here.

My thoughts:

Categories, to me, is like another way to arrange your archives. Blog defaults are to archive by date. Nice, but not helpful to most readers looking for something. A search box helps me find or see if you’ve written about particular topics, but I have to guess that out. Categories allow you to arrange your archives by words, topics, or thoughts that you feel they belong in.

I’m still brainstorming, but here’s a couple of thoughts…

1. Make shorter, more topical posts. That helps you come up with a word or two to categorize.
2. Ignore my first thought if that’s not your style. You blog…your style…
3. Skim-read your blog and see if there are themes.
4. You don’t have to force-fit posts into a single category. Use a few categories if you want.

What is it you want people to be able to do on your blog? Just track with you? Do you want to have them be able to find older stuff easily? If it’s just to track, don’t sweat it too much.