Only Eight Months of Postings Left to Categorise

When I decided to turn on SquareSpace’s categorisation widget for my site I knew it was going to take a bit of work to implement but I really didn’t fully understand just how much thinking and work was involved.

First there is working out what your categories are going to be.

When you search around the Web for ideas on this most of the suggestions have the normal boring categorisations along the lines of Family, Holidays, Work, Health, Hobbies, Cooking, Friends, etc. But right from the start I decided I did not want to go with these ‘normal’ somewhat boring categorisation suggestions. So from the very beginning I had the challenge of coming up with my own categorisations—which was not as easy as I first thought it would be.

Another often repeated tip you will get from the Web is to avoid categories such as Other, General, or Miscellaneous. I have sort of managed to achieve this, although I do have “hmmmm” which is sort of an Other/General—but not really.

Also most of the help about categorisation from the Web tells you to try and keep your categories to around 20; between 15 and 25 anyway. I have 26 so I have sort of failed in achieving this recommendation but I might eliminate two or three categories once I finish doing all my categorisations; when I can see what the final distribution is.

Another recommendation that I have not managed to comply with is that you should try and put every posting into at least two categories. While many of my postings are in multiple categories there are also quite a number that I could only really put into a single category. So I have failed a bit on that recommendation as well. But then recommendations are just that. You don’t HAVE to do it that way.

However, as you would realise, the biggest chunk of work is to then go through each posting and put each one into one or more categories. I have over 650 postings on the site so this is taking a bit of time; more than I expected. I need to do a very quick review of each posting to ensure I cover all the categories it needs to go into.

At this point I have eight months left to categorise and I would very much like to get this finished over this weekend if I can.