After giving it a little more thought, I have decided to use the term “site themes” instead of categories. The latter implies (to me, at least) that each post will be put in one and only one category, which is not at all how I have organized the site. “Themes” seems a little more flexible and inclusive.
I’d love to see a tool that supports a lower-level clustering of posts for capturing memes. For example, I write about the idea of blogging as parallel play here, here, and here. It would be nice if there were some easy way to cluster those posts for my readers.
I envision a second screen in the post submission page flow that would do this job. After you submit a post, the blogging software would scan it for permalinks to previous posts within your blog as well as similar text strings in the title. If it finds any, it would ask you if you would like to tie the posts together in a meme or, if one or more of the other posts is already labeled as belonging to one or memes, give you the option of associating the new post with the existing meme. So, for example, if I wrote a post called “Parallel Play Grows Up, Part III” and clicked the “submit” button, my blog software would show me the previous parallel play posts and give me a check box to select if I want to add this one to the “Blogging as Parallel Play” meme. (Optionally, it could also allow me to link in trackbacks and comments.) Then I could generate a “meme” list in my sidebar. Users interested in reading the meme would be able to click on a link that shows only the meme-related posts in reverse-chronological order.
If any EE hackers are out there reading this, my birthday is August 9th…
