Nine months later, I’m merging my blogs back into one. (Apparently this is going to be a regular back-and-forth thing here, so you may want to get used to it.)
Long story short, I think I’m more prone to blog if I don’t have to worry about categorizing my posts. Tagging is fine for some reason, but categories seem to add cognitive friction, so I’ve gotten rid of them. We’ll see how it goes.
Of minor technical note is that I’ve turned Slash into a pure web service backend, and the blog frontend is now hosted on the same domain as the rest of my site. This is the first time I’ve split the frontend off from the backend, but already I really like it — division of concerns, loose coupling, etc. At some point I’m planning to look into doing the same split with the rest of the site. (To clarify: at the moment, the site and the blog run on two different backends. With the site, the backend and frontend are currently unified.)
The pruning and splitting of the blogs is now complete. From 2,600 posts down to 400, and from one blog to (cough) fifteen. In my defense, these blogs are basically like categories, albeit with a bit more separation (tags don’t cross blog boundaries).
There is of course a feed for each blog (see the subscribe page for the list), and I decided to do a consolidated feed as well. I also added exclusion parameters to the consolidated feed, so if you really don’t care about my type design and art posts, for example, you can use this URL: https://blogs.bencrowder.net/feed/?exclude=type-design,art
The blogs are running on Slash, a Django app I wrote. It’s fairly simple, and writing it hardly took any time at all. (What took the most time was going through the 2,600 posts and deciding which to keep and which blog to put them in.) Also, I’m trying out Disqus for comments. Still not completely sold on it, but it was faster than adding comments to Slash.
Now back to more interesting things.