Archival Horticulture

Thanks to everyone who gave feedback in the Noteworthy? post. In the end, I went with a ‘combined ops’ approach, taking a little from all the suggestions. Most of the changes have now been phased in, and the sharp-eyed may have noticed the archives page’s metamorphosis from sequential list of posts to something more complex—and hopefully more useful.

A major overhaul of the categories had been coming for some time, and the renovation seemed like a perfect opportunity to implement it. There simply weren’t enough entries to justify the level of granularity the old categories had, and I wanted to shift the entire way I approached them. Previously, they were very subject-oriented: music, photography, science fiction and so on. While this worked well for the articles that fell naturally into these categories, too much simply didn’t.

Accordingly, I’ve settled for a far simpler set of categories, differentiated by subject where it’s appropriate and by association where it’s not. So, there’s a philosophy category, because my entries on that tend to be fairly focused. On the other hand, I’ve got words which covers everything from books to writing and language itself. Intramural covers this site and my various projects, while transient posts are relevant within a certain timeframe but may lose their importance later.

The Clean Archives list was getting a little too long, so I’ve replaced it with a list of monthly archives. At a glance, it gives a good idea of how long I’ve been writing here, and my posting frequency. It does increase the number of clicks needed to reach articles in the archives, but together with the next/previous links on individual articles, it should improve the browsing experience.

Now for a possibly more controversial admission: I did some pruning. In my view, Jay nailed it when he said

Some people think it’s just not in the ‘blogging spirit’ to delete entries, but personally I think you should have a better reason than that for knowingly leaving dross on the web. The web is already a giant electronic landfill site, and/or vastly overgrown garden. If people pruned their sites regularly the web as a whole would be improved, less time wasted, and some inroads into information overload made.

Perhaps it resonated as it did because I see this website as a garden. I’ve talked about iterative design before, and weblogs are a paradigmatic example because they change so rapidly: new content is added every few days, and people comment on articles, which brings in unexpected elements. The design has to change to meet these evolving needs, as well as the whims of the gardener. The metaphor also captures the fact that perhaps we’re not completely in control: growth is organic, and while we weed and prune and fertilise, a lot of things happen without us quite realising or meaning it.

At any rate, there was a significant chunk of entries I was less than happy with, so I excised them. This is the right time of year for work like this: the council have just finished pruning all the trees down my road, and they look mutilated; it was a pretty brutal shearing. Still, in a few months, with new leaves budding and the spring light filtering through them, I’ll be glad all the dead wood is gone.

The final change I’ve made is the addition of vintage articles. These are pieces I feel represent the best of my writing here, and give something of a sense of the breadth of topics discussed here. On reflection, they’re all in some way related to music, but that was an unconscious factor in my decisions. Hopefully they will give new visitors some good starting points; it’s also an opportunity to highlight articles that perhaps didn’t attract the interest that they deserved to at the time. Further nominations and suggestions for the category would be very welcome. Thanks again to everyone who helped.