This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz
by Eric Stewart.
Original Post: Problem with RSS categories
Feed Title: Ponderings On Ruby
Feed URL: http://blog.eric-stewart.com/category/programming-ruby.rss
Feed Description: This is the Ruby related section of Eric Stewart's weblog. These entries will be the commentary of a long time Java/C++ programmer that started exploring Ruby in 2003.
Adam Green recently made an example of my blog in his article, Problem with RSS categories. I have been wrestling with this issue myself for a while through various incarnations of this blog and I’m glad he started this discussion.
A good blog, unlike this one, is able to narrow its scope and present subject matter in at most one general area, and even better a more specific area. So, a blog such as this that usually posts about programming and software development (usually regarding Ruby most recently) isn’t too off topic posting about the DARPA Grand Challenge, but my posts about the Texas Longhorns or football really don’t fit.
I rationalized this by saying, “Hey! I have categories and tags that users can use to control what they are interested in when coming to my site.” But I know that doesn’t cut it. Blog readers both new and advanced will have to do some filtering when they come to my site to read content they are interested in. Many existing subscribers who visited my site to read a Rails post and subscribed to my feed might be surprised by a Longhorns football post now and then.
And for other aggregators, like Artima Ruby Buzz or Planet Rails I haven’t perceived a problem, because when I added my site to those aggregators I only gave them my Ruby or Rails feeds (the advantage of a blog having a feed per category and/or by tag). But when Adam added my feed to his RubyRiver aggregator, he added my general feed because it probably isn’t clear enough which feeds would interest his readers.
And by the way Adam, the two Ruby categories “Ruby” and “Ruby on Rails” is one of those cases where some categories are hierarchical. At least that’s what I thought when I set them up. Many blogs still use purely hierarchical categorization (which I didn’t like for everything). But an author (me for example) might think, “Hmm. Rails is just a technology built using Ruby, so anyone interested in Ruby might have an interest in Rails, but not vice-versa.” So, I’m actually looking at it now thinking that my practice of categorizing every Rails post as a Ruby post is probably incorrect (Don’t assume the hierarchy). Which leads me to my next though:
Are Blog Categories Dead?
Maybe. With the tagging becoming all the rage, categories might be less relevant in the future. Why? Because tags and categories and tags are similar enough, yet tagging offers more flexibility. Categories are intended to be fixed organizational units of a site, while tags are dynamic and can often better summarize the content of a specific post.
In fact, some of the benefits I have seen in the past aren’t even being supported by some blogging packages. Typo, for example, doesn’t offer any special functionality for categories other than an organization unit that aggregators and blog posting tools understand. But they understand keywords (tags) too.
Other blog packages offer special features like per-category pinging. I have seen this used for at least one aggregator site, where component feeds were required to ping the aggregator when a new post was added to the category to be included. However most aggregators are going to the polling model, which is a smart thing since a site operator shouldn’t have to take any action for their syndicated feed to be included in another site or aggregator.
So, maybe categories should die. Maybe tagging is proving itself, is similar enough, and is understood well enough by users that it replaces the categories, which at best might serve as groupings of popular related tags. But it’s still a site maintainer’s job to make sure the content is at least logically organized.
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