View-Driven Tagging

I'm not satisfied with the browsability of my blog.  While I can get to a lot of the nuggets I need, sometimes I have to dig.

My initial reaction was that I just need to throw all my nuggets into a Wiki and do what I do best.  Then I realized, no, I'm making a very basic mistake.   True, blogs are oriented around time, but there's a lot I can do with tags.  I simply need to make the most out of what I've got, before I take another path.

There's a few things I need to do:

• Think in terms of drill-down.  I was thinking too much about multiple entry points and not enough about bigger buckets to smaller buckets. 
• Think big-buckets first.  I need to think in big buckets first.  For example, I need to browse all the Security.  Within security, I then want to browse Security Engineering. Or within Performance, I then want to browse Performance Engineering. 
• Test-drive my views.  It's one thing to tag, it's another to use them.  I sometimes get surprised when I click a tag and don't see the set of posts I expect.  I need to make browsing my tags more of a habbit.
• Use under-the-gun tests.  It's one thing for me to find what I want, when I take my time.  Can I do it on the fly, can I do it fast, can I do it when I'm at somebody else's machine and I have 30 seconds to make a point?
• Test with users.  OK, so I can find my posts and I can find them quickly.  Can my teammates or a customer?  Time to test.

I do have a few other rules of thumb that guide me.  Rather than make a bunch of buckets up front and then wonder how to fill them, I prefer to make them as I need them.  Also, even though I'm adding a little more focus to being able to walk my categories, I realize there's many paths, and part of the power of tags is more about "related item" discoverability, than actual hiearchy.

Comments

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  June 17, 2007
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