New Categories

One cool feature of our blog that we don't really take advantage of very much is the Category feature, which is a way of sorting blog posts by topic.  When we first created the blog way back in 2004, Gustavo and I just came up with some categories to put there and haven't really touched them since then.  Well, you may have noticed that the categories we came up with were hopelessly broad (like 'free will') and as such quite unhelpful for sorting posts.  Some contributors did place their posts in categories, but most didn't.  The time has come to make the Category feature more useful, so here's what we've done.

Tamler had the brilliant idea that we should take a leaf out of PEA Soup's book, and have categories for each contributor's posts, so that someone could, for instance, find all of Manuel's posts with just one click.  You can now do that.  If you scroll down, you'll see the categories on the left-hand sidebar -- one for each contributor (who has actually posted something on the main page).  I spent the last couple of hours sorting all of our archived posts, but the sorting of new posts will be up to you all.  Whenever you post something, please remember to file it under the correct instance of the category schema "Posts by [your name]".

While I was at it, I deleted the other useless categories we had up there.  If there are any other categories people think would be useful to have, let me know and we can start filing posts in them from now on.

Thanks for the suggestion, Tamler -- it's a great improvement to the usefulness of the Garden, I think.

Comments

[Scott Aldous]

I applaud all attempts to make information on this blog easier to find. I've searched for things here in the past that I've had a very hard time finding.

That being said, could some sort of search function be added, perhaps by keyword? That would make it much easier to find certain posts, such as comments by someone who isn't a regular contributor.

[Jonathan Farrell]

A search function would be useful. In the meantime, a search on google that includes the term site:gfp.typepad.com should work better than a general google (or whatever) search.