j's scratchpad

I thought by going to the page for the department, I could view a longer list of posts from that department. While looking for items on the blog on your own blog or comment on another blog debate, I realized the Blogging category only shows a few months of posts instead of going back to July 25, 2003, when I created the category. I realize getting the computer to display posts from more than a year will take a while and create a really long screen, but how else can I find what I’m looking for when the search engine doesn’t return results (it only indexes this blog back to October 2003) and the table of contents doesn’t seem to work, either?

I feel frustrated because it seems to me that one of the points of having categories is to allow navigation to those posts. I can understand server load and screen real estate and all that, but I don’t understand why there isn’t an easier way to get to older posts. Navigating to earlier posts is a huge problem in this installation of Manila. The way Shimon Rura implemented it in Frassle seems to be a much more practical approach. There’s a list of post titles in the left margin and if there are more posts than what the default displays, there’s a link to follow to view all of the posts and there’s a count so users know what they’re getting into. The mirror of this blog in Frassle does have 143 posts in its category Blogging. (Hello to Shimon’s ego feed!)

Even though some of the documentation on Feedster’s site implies it’s possible to do a search limited to the field category, category searches for Blogging or blogging didn’t work. (Yes, categories show up in my feed.)

Now I’m rethinking how I use categories on this blog. I’ve been using broad categories because they can be so much easier than using specific, narrow terms, but maybe I need to split some of the bigger categories up so people can get to the older posts easier. But how can I do that if I can’t get to the posts? If the system allowed multiple categories on a blog post, some of this would be much easier.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 6th, 2004 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.