Updated Blog Structure—Again!

A year and a half ago, I split my blog posts into “essays” and “updates”. The former being mostly long-form writing and the latter—my personal updates and other minor stuff. I had a feeling for a long time, but now I’m almost certain—this was a bad idea!

Categorization can constrain thinking. And that’s how I’ve been feeling about my blog for some time. If I want to write a programming tutorial, it’s not really an essay, but it’s also not an update—it’s an original piece of writing. However, I don’t want to create a whole new section on my website dedicated to tutorials. Well, maybe, but it shouldn’t clutter the site. And that would be certainly happen with all the new categories I’d come up with.

There is no perfect solution to this, but I did following:

• I got rid of major sections.
• To make it easy to find relevant reads, I added a “category” to each post; you’ll find these at /blog. You might say that it’s the exact same thing as sections, but I really view this taxonomy as being soft, something I’ll be unafraid to change. I say “unafraid” because I removed section names from URLs, so any category changes from now on will not require tedious refactoring.

Additionally, I made these changes:

• Removed dates from URLs. I hope most of my blog posts will make sense even after some time has passed.
• Removed all RSS feeds except the main one. Sorry to all those who subscribed to feeds of specific tags! I just feel these feeds are redundant because I already include tag information in the <category> elements, so you should be able to filter the posts in your RSS reader (if it’s any good…). For now, I redirect all RSS feeds to the main one. If that’s annoying, feel free to unsubscribe.
• Removed trailing slashes from URLs. Looks better!

I took great care to not break anything (even wrote a few Go functions!), but if you notice anything strange, please let me know!