This month, I started working on a large-scale project to pass the time and practice what I learned from work, instructional course design. I also decided I wanted to revamp the blog but haven’t pushed any changes, everything so far has been in draft phase. I’ve set a goal to publish something today.
Data tags
Within the blog, I use two types of tags to sort my posts, search tags and meta tags. From within the data folder, I defined 6 search related tags to reflect my existing posts, with 5 more in-progress.
Existing Tags
- job: Career growth as a software engineer, technical writer, or developer advocate
- site: Site updates, mainly the blog or repo release notes.
- code: Blogs with code, focused on software or emerging technology.
- write: Blogs about writing, technical writing, and writing code.
- learn: Blogs about me spending time to learn something random
- me: Blogs containing personal information such as life events.
New Tags
While I was thinking of a new blog direction by coming up with the theme of composition. By aligning it with a single umbrella term, I could branch off more easily and come up with more mutually exclusive tags ideas. I tried to condense the terms and came up with these new mutually exclusive tags.
- story: The RPG game I’ve been working on has plenty of world-building elements, some are NPC character creation.
- trial: Trials are my way of testing myself. These short trials are process and goal driven to build and document the steps.
- tech: Generally, this tag is used for software related posts, not me building it, but it’s more software related thoughts.
- memo: A focus on my memoirs, a life story which replaces the me tag. Each name should be 3-5 characters for the button to be clean.
- new: This tag is essentially a placeholder for “other”, when enough tags have new and are related I’ll revisit them to find it’s true name.
Meta tags
Meta tags are not used for search, but are instead used to categorize the content in the posts folder.
- pin: Any post that is displayed at the start of posts, usually those I want readers to see the most. Rotates every now and then, up to 3.
- log: Posts that were new, either in the drafts folder, focusing more on the free-style writing. These aren’t editted for clarity. Hidden from blog.
- bleh: Posts that are in need of review before publish (drafts folder). It’s either too short or the topic didn’t match. Ex. trials that didn’t quite fit.
Overhead
Using Jekyll, the common practice is to create a post in drafts, then run a command to move it into the posts folder. But, if I had wanted to exclude from the blog, I would need a new folder. This led to me creating a projects folder to create posts specfically for projects/portfolio. This was alright at the time, but as I wanted to expand to more of notetaking, I ended up with a flooded drafts folder or too many unpublished branches.
Purpose of Meta Tags
In the last major blog update, I learned how to pass the equivalent of “props” in Jekyll, this allowed me to filter before rendering. It was enough to be rid of the flooded drafts folder, and I started off with a small test to use the pin attribute to conditionally render the posts. Now that I have a working prototype, it’s time to extend this to other terms. With that, I have log to purposefully publish, but not display certain posts in the blog. I may create a page to display only logs later. I believe these changes can help me keep my blog cleaner and more searchable.
Post Process
When I write blog posts, I review them before publish and try to plan out what to write about after it sits in my head. This effort takes time going back to edit with detailed planning effort. But, for drafts, I start them as more of a free-writing exercise to reduce burnout. A similar concept of a mind dump. I try to type my thoughts directly and as a result, the flow becomes more conversational but isn’t as guided as an outlined post. It’s only when the drafts seem like something worth posting, that I revist the topic, see what else I can add and push them.
Changes to tags
My finalized list for tags to update the search filters.
- job: Career growth as a software engineer, technical writer, or developer advocate
- site: Site updates, mainly the blog or repo release notes.
- story: The RPG game I’ve been working on has plenty of world-building elements, some are NPC character creation.
- trial: Trials are my way of testing myself. These short trials are process and goal driven to build and document the steps.
- tech: Generally, this tag is used for software related posts, not me building it, but it’s more software related thoughts.
- me: Posts about personal growth due to major life events.
- memo: Marks information that I’d like to remember, such as an idea or plan.
- new: A placeholder for “other”. When enough tags are “new” and related I’ll create a tag from it.
Clean up
The quick clean up for this iteration of changes is to
- Add the “memo” tag
- Add the “tech” tag
- Add the “trial” tag
- Add the “story” tag.
- Remove “learn” tag.
- Remove “code” tag
- Remove “write” tag
- Revise any with no tag to say “new”
- Update new tags to match any other tags.
I wrote a short regex that I know future me will need once again. It checks the tags front matter and sees which contain the deprecated values.
tags: .*{tag_name}*