[theforum] revisiting categories

[adrinux]

Looking good everyone :)
Just to add my 2p worth...

2008/12/23 Martin Burns <martin at easyweb.co.uk>:
> I do think there's a category missing though, at the sysadmin/hardware
> end of things.

     * Systems (? yeah, not that great)
     * Process (Site Development should maybe just be 'Process'? Is
'site' still relevant in the age of web apps? And lets keep 'em short,
we have an audience that knows what tooltips are and where to find
them)
     * Visual
     * IA/UX
     * Code (this would be include front-end and back-end 'code')
     * Culture (fuck it let's copy ALA's 'culture', it's a lot
snappier commentary and society is a hell of a mouthful)
     * News (do we really need to specify 'Reviews'? shift it to a tag)

>     - Software
Lets drop this, software could apply to at least 5 of those categories
above. And that's where Martin's suggestion of Tags comes in handy
(though tag !== tag cloud of course).

It's perfectly possible to have both a hard taxonomy for the main
article navigation and tags for the sub categories, they can adapt and
change easily with new technologies/jargon (flavour of the month) -
pretty much what Martin said. You avoid 'hard' coding them into the
site structure, UI and navigation too, which is another plus.

It just leaves us with the question of how to expose the tags in the
UI. Some existing ways this is done that I can think of put which we
don't *need* to use:

(1)  the usual 'list of tags' with each article
(2)  lists of tags in a sidebar or footer block
(3)  tag clouds
(4)  site map style pages

any other idea's?
I think (1) is a useful convention.


-- 
Adrian Simmons | http://perlucida.com