For this post I want to look at the structure of my blog. Unlike a notebook that forms a monolithic record, using a blog allows for a more structured approach to filing my writings away, searching and finding entries.
I originally created this blog to serve as a repository of my own thoughts and ideas; somewhere to file my research, document my learning and record personal development. I did exactly that with my photography blog, theLightMatters.com, and noticed a very interesting side effect: writing about the skills and techniques I was using created a step change in my work. The more I wrote and shared, the better my images became. This is something I’m very keen to repeat on the IGD programme so imagine my surprise when I discovered that keeping a reflective journal was an integral part of the course.
ScaryBlankPage will grow and evolve quite significantly over the next two years. Assuming an average of 2.5 posts per week over the 72 formative weeks of the course means writing and publishing 180 posts. Adding my project notes and documentation, concepts, ideas and miscellaneous musings will likely see that number grow to 250+ posts. To put that into context, I only wrote 285 posts for theLightMatters.com since it began in 2009.
[Note to self: Revisit this post in 2022 to see how accurate the above prediction was]
One of the lessons I learnt from theLightMatters.com was the importance of structure. The site grew organically over the years and its purpose evolved along with the main business resulting in some heavy maintenance refactoring and restructuring the posts. The next two years are likely to be very intense so if I can, I want to avoid needing to restructure the posts on Scary Blank Page.
Fortunately, the course structure is well defined and as recommended in the Week 1 guidance text “Journal System Setup” it seems only logical to use the five course modules as the top level categories. The text also suggests subdividing these categories into four distinct sections to cover Research, Development, Activity and Planning.
Whilst this may seem logical at first it requires the creation of categories with duplicate names e.g. the five subcategories named Research. It also presents a usability/navigability issue for the reader
- What if the reader wishes to find/read all the research posts?
- What if I want to find all the research posts within a specific module?
A matrix approach may provide a better alternative…
With this arrangement the top-level categories will be the five modules; the four post types (running horizontally) could either be additional categories or tags. To support the second ‘what if’ case above would require the use of tags rather than categories.
The matrix structure is also far easier to extend if, say, another post type is required. Here, we simply need to create one new tag or category. With the hierarchical structure, adding a new post type will require adding multiple subcategories, one per module.
UPDATE
My original thoughts were to use WordPress tags to indicate the type of post (Research, Development, Activity or Planning). Upon reflection I’m now leaning more towards creating another class of category instead. This won’t support such fine grained filtering as depicted in the second ‘What if’ scenario above but I’m not convinced there’s a strong need for that particular Use Case. Besides, there is always the Search feature…
Conclusion
I’ve decided to opt for a matrix structure for the posts on this blog using two orthogonal category groups. Readers will then be able to take either a vertical or horizontal slice through the posts depending on whether they’re interested in posts relating to a particular course module or type of post.
List of Images
Figure 1. THORN, 2020 Structure as recommended in course guidance text
Figure 2. THORN, 2020 Matrix structure
