The Blog Reorganization Project
First, I’m announcing the Winter Preview will be out by the 31st of the month, so that gives you something big to look forward to.
Now then, I got the idea in my head to do a major organization overhaul. After getting approval from CJ, I spent most of my Thursday going through every post of the blog for this project. This post is about the in-depth changes that I made, mostly to the categories structure. That would be that drop down menu on the right side of your screen. If you’re not interested in reading about that, suffice to say everything now works as intended and it should be easier for you to navigate.
The first order of business is the Anime and Manga categories. To understand the change I made, you have to know how we used to use these. Originally, we applied these to any post that did not have its own series category, a sort of catchall for miscellaneous posts if you will. Naturally, this made perfect sense to us, since we’re the ones writing this stuff. However, I felt it was very counter-intuitive for the reader. I imagine that when you click on the Anime category, you expect to get every single post about anime in sequence. That expectation is completely reasonable, so I decided to implement it.
The majority of my work on Thursday was going through every post by hand to apply this behavior. Additionally, to make them easier to find, they’ve been placed within the Media container, which has also been moved to the top of the category search. Cosplay will be joining them in that container, I felt it made more sense there than in the Conventions container. Now because of the behavior Anime and Manga used to have, I have also created a wealth of categories for individual series. Any series that has had at least one complete post devoted to it will show up in the list. If one of us simply mentioned it in passing, I ignored it. These changes should make it easier to find what you’re looking for, both in general and specific instances.
The next matter of business is the Review category. This is supposed to apply to reviews of an entire series, a volume of manga, or a stand-alone work, such as an audio CD. This behavior hasn’t change, and we feel that it’s the best way to handle it. Rather, the problem was we were wildly inconsistent about applying our own rules. Sometimes individual episodes were tagged as reviews, sometimes a full series didn’t get the treatment, and that can become very confusing to the reader. Additionally, the criteria for a review requires it to cover everything, including the plot, characters, animation, music, voice work, and so on, usually ending in a more concrete score. I have restored our intended behavior and properly aggregated all reviews.
The last major change involves the creation of a new Feature category, Commentary. I intend for this type of post to talk about a series or a news event. An example of this in relation to anime would be talking about the characters in an anime and their relationships, rather than the actual series. For news, this would be giving personal thoughts on an event, rather than really providing the news story. I hope that that’s easy to understand, if not, let me know and I’ll come up with a better example. The criterion for this is arbitrary for old posts. I tagged posts that I felt were sufficiently commentary-ish. This category should really find its own niche in future posts.
The rest of my changes are minor. I found a wealth of posts that weren’t properly attributed to their authors, especially back toward the beginning of the blog, so I properly marked those. I merged Jpop into the Music category, as I noticed most of those posts overlapped anyway and there wasn’t sufficient difference in the rest to call for its own category. Finally, I went through and deleted all empty tags and categories, which shortened the list a fair deal for both.
The result is a much more manageable blog for us, and a much easier to navigate blog for you. Everyone wins. What’s next? I don’t know. If you have any suggestions, please, leave them here and we’ll consider them. We want this to be a blog that is easy to work with and enjoyable for everyone.
Finally, by way of suggestion to you all, if you have your own blog, take a minute to look at your navigation system. If you think anything needs changed, do it now, because it will take you forever if you wait. Trust me, I know.
