If you look to the column at the right, you may notice a change. I've moved the Archives off to their own page and added a list of the five most recent comments.
This has been a long time coming. For the past couple of months, since a discussion at the first Japan Bloggers' Party in February in fact, I've been thinking about the archives of this weblog.
But I have a quandary.
When I began my weblog, I just lumped all the entries together each month. Now that I've accumulated 35 months of writing, maybe monthly archives are not the best way to go.
When I converted to Moveable Type last year, I started categorising my posts. But even so, I'll make my 1,000th entry later this week and I have only 5 categories.
Some weblogs have scores of categories with just a few posts each. My topics range far and wide, so I've opted for just a few broad categories: Work Updates, Japan Commentary, Personal Reflections, The Wider World, and Food & Recipes.
Since I have to go through and categories the first two years of Blogger-created posts, I'm trying to think carefully about my categories. What other categories make sense for this weblog? Should I have a separate category for video, instead of putting it under Work Updates? Should I subdivide the Japan Commentary category into, I'm not sure...Japan Nature, Japan Society, In Tokyo?
What do you think? Have you ever looked back for things in the weblog? What would have made the experience better? What do you do on your weblog that you think is worthwhile for me to adopt?
I think one of the problems with categories is that with no ability to make subcategories of a major category, one could make just a hundred categories, leaving it up to the user to decide what topic a given thought would be under. I like date based archives, and maybe throwing MT's native search engine down there would help too in finding posts.
A Maria Yumeno section would help a lot!!