May 02, 2003
More blogging toolage
Of course, just after I wrote my last entry I came across mpt's shopping list for blogging functionality. All good stuff, and I especially like hist RESTful approach to URIs.
The only thing I am not mad keen on is his very complicated category and facet classification scheme. I appreciate that you can accumulate a lot of content over the years (even this blog has 114 entries). But rather than classify it in ever more obscure ways why not just add a search engine? A classification system is quite useful and should be part of any tool, but perhaps not as complex as the one proposed.
Posted by Andy Todd at May 02, 2003 04:31 PM
Why not just add a search engine? Ooh, ooh, I know this one! “Because when you’ve been keeping a Weblog for twenty or thirty years, and you can’t remember any semi-unique words you used in a particular entry, finding it will be horribly difficult, and you’ll need all the semantic help you can get.”
The categorization scheme would be in *addition* to a search engine, and it would only be as complicated as you wanted it to be at any time. By default, it would start off with no categories at all. Then once you’d posted, say, 12 entries, it would say “Hey, do you want to set up categories to make these entries easier to find later?” Then once any one of those categories got more than 12 entries in them (a few weeks or months later), it would ask you if you wanted to set up subcategories for that category. And so on into the subsubcategories, after years and decades, as the number of entries you posted began to approach the magnitude of the number of books in a small library. Libraries have decimal classification schemes, as well as search engines, for a *reason*.
Posted by: mpt on May 3, 2003 05:11 AM