Tuesday, 25 July 2006, 12:55:26 EDT

After my last post, I decided that I should start categorizing my posts (or "tagging" as the kids are calling it nowadays). Some of the postings I make to this site are intended for a general audience; not necessarily a technical audience. I think there may have been some confusion about that in the past, and I hope the new categories will help.

There haven't been any posts this July because of the category feature. I didn't want to write any new posts until I finished implementing it. I had to go back and categorize every post I have written since August of 2003. There have been a lot of posts so it was no light task. I would say it took me at least a day's worth of time to complete; of course, that was stretched over a few weeks. Once I got all the previous posts "tagged" I had to write support for them in my scripts. A much lighter task.

You should now see a list of categories under each posting date. You can click on each category link to execute a search for all posts that are categorized as such. You will also find that the archives page has changed. I added what is known as a "tag cloud" to make browsing categories easier. If you look at the cloud you should clearly see that this site has no one subject. In fact, a majority of the posts are of a personal nature; followed closely by information about developments to this site (like this post).

I have tried to add tags to a post that represent the actual subject of said post. So, if I mention Coca-Cola in a post, but it is only a reference and not a subject of discussion, the post won't be tagged "Coca-Cola." I find it to be very annoying when people do that sort of thing. Hopefully, you won't find many, if any at all, posts that are so tagged.

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