Last tended on 5 July, 2022 (first created 19 June, 2022)

1. Index of tags in blogposts that I’ve used at least five times

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

R

S

T

U

V

W

Y

Z

2

2. Index of categories for blogposts

to come

3. Index of categories for pages

3.1. Topics

3.2. Site structure

3 reactions on “Index

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  1. In Annotation by Kalir and Garcia, the authors observe that several things we now see as integral to what a non-fiction book is were actually also emergent phenomena from annotation by readers. Things like labels, rubrics, glossary and index. Kalir and Garcia make much of the social aspects of annotation, and the conversations those create. I’m fond of things that generate (distributed) conversations, I blog after all, but also have reservations when it comes to sharing tentative notes, associations and other annotations.
    There are steps possible however to do a little bit more in allowing others to explore what I’ve written here. And an Index is an easy enough step to make. Easy enough because I can follow the footsteps of Chris Aldrich and Frank Meeuwsen who did this last year September/October.
    Like them I installed the Multi column tag map WordPress plugin. Now this blog too has an Index, which shows you the tags I’ve used the past 20 years. Or rather the tags I’ve used at least 5 times.
    It’s also immediately a useful tool for myself it turns out. Some postings had all their tags joined into a single tag (an error from when I imported posts while switching from Movable Type to WordPress, a decade ago), other tags are simple variations of the same word (e.g. singular and plural). Fixing these is easy, now that the Index list has surfaced the ones that need fixing.
    A photo of a book index, by Ben Weiner, license CC BY ND

  2. A summary overview of changes I made to this site, to make it more fully a indieweb hub / my core online presence. The set-up of my WordPress installation also has been described.
    Theme related tweaks

    Created child theme of Sempress, to be able to change appearance and functions
    Renamed comments to reactions (as they contain likes, reposts, mentions etc.)
    in the entry-footer template and the comments template
    Removed h-card microformats, and put in a generic link to my about page for the author in the Sempress function sempress_posted_on. Without a link to the author mentions show up as anonymous elsewhere.
    Removed the sharing buttons I used (although they were GDPR compliant using the Sharriff plugin, but they got in the way a lot I felt.
    Added a few menu options for various aspects of my postings (books, check-ins, languages)
    Introduced several categories to deal with different content streams: Dutch, German for non-English postings, Day to Day for things not on the home page, Plazes for check-ins, Books for ehh books, RSS-Only for unlisted postings, and Micromessage for tweets I send from the blog. This allows me to vary how I display these different types of things (or not)
    Displaying last edited and created dates to (wiki)pages
    Added a widget with projects I support
    Added to the single post template a section that mentions and links the number of Hypothes.is annotations for that post, where they exist.

    Functionality related tweaks

    Started creating pages as a wiki-like knowledgebase, using page categories to create the wiki structure
    To show excerpts from webmentions I changed the template for a webmention in the Semantinc backlinks plugin, class-linkbacks-handler.php
    Added a plugin to display blogposts on the same date in previous years.
    Added plugin Widget Context to remove recent posts and comments from individual posting’s pages, as they cause trouble with parsing them for webmentions.
    Using categories as differentiator I added language mark-up to individual postings, category archives. Also added automatic translation links to non-English postings in the RSS feed (not on the site). On the front page non-English postings have language mark-up around the posting.
    Added a blogroll that is an OPML file with a stylesheet, so it can be equally read by humans and machines.
    Added an extra RSS feed for comments that excludes webmentions and ping/trackbacks
    Added a /feeds page
    Added a Now page
    Added a Hello page
    Added a way to share book lists / feeds.
    Stopped embedding slide decks, and stopped embedding new Flickr photos (as well as removed older embeds, currently 23 postings between January 2013 and July 2018 still have them, and 22 postings from June 2006 to July 2009)
    Removed all affilliate links to Amazon books as it entails tracking
    Added an Index (using a plugin)
    Added my own basic check-in and Dopplr style posts

    Other tweaks

    Set up 2 additional WordPress instances for testing purposes (Proto and Meso)

  3. I noticed a few days ago that my Pagefind installation, the tiny search tool I use to enable searching on this website, was out of date—so I updated it and made some adjustments as to what to index. It now supports custom placeholder translations so that’s great.
    But Pagefind is a Javascript-only plugin, so what happens when people disable JS? They lose the search functionality and are greeted with a miserable “I’m sorry” message wrapped in a <noscript/> tag. That’s less than great! Then it occured to me, if JS is disabled, I could simply revert to using DuckDuckGo as my external search engine, like Ruben Schade uses by default on his archives page. This principle fits neatly the idea of website fidelity that Jim Nielsen is super intrigued by, or what we in the software development world would call “graceful degradation”. The only downside now is that the results are presented elsewhere.
    Then I wondered—how do other bloggers help their visitors find stuff? This problem is especially relevant on bigger blogs that have been writing for a while. I’ll try to give an overview.
    Matt Webb wrote about helping readers find a way on his blog for a specific set of articles regarding the multiplayer web. He came up with a hyperlinked map that visualizes and emphasizes the interconnectedness of certain individual blog posts. This reminds me a lot of Obsidian’s graph view that is auto-generated if you publish to the web using their service.
    What’s more interesting, however, is the bottom part of the link to Matt’s Interconnected blog, that redirects the reader to various outer sections of his blog using the following links:

    More posts tagged with (x);
    A list of most recent posts where the current one is highlighted if applicable;
    Continue reading: all in (year);
    New? start here: best of (prev. years);
    explore the archives: on this day;
    A list of archive by year;
    A search bar;

    The “on this day” links are a fun way to do some random spelunking on blogs. I especially enjoy Frank Meeuwsen’s On This Day that links to articles of several months and years ago. They do not share a topic but just happen to be written on that day in another month/year. Of course, this is only interesting if you have been writing for a long time.
    My search bar and archive list is tucked away in /archive—otherwise you run into the risk of having a below-article section that’s larger than the article itself. Speaking of archive, I remodeled the tag list it inspired by Ton Zijlstra’s multi-column blog index. My archive page also comes with a year list and a short sentence describing the general mood of that year inspired by an older version of Ruben’s archive page.
    Others just dump a link to every single article they’ve ever written in their archive page, which is in line with Jeff Huang’s guidelines to design pages that last: don’t use pagination. That’s good advice that’s simply not feasible for blogs with a huge repository of writings.
    Take a look at Jim’s blog homepage: it contains three article links for the following categories: latest, popular this month, hacker news hits, and personal favorites. That’s another interesting way to direct newcomers to Matt’s “best of” posts. Roy Tang adds recent links to this list, but these are outbound links and not ways to help find stuff on-site. Luke Harris displays previous and next blog posts at the end of his articles, which are not necessarily related.
    Sebastiaan Andeweg’s blog has a sidebar that contains recent blog posts, split into Dutch and English. This disappears after you click through. James’ Coffee blog has an old skool sitemap link on the bottom of each page, listing all the “parent pages” of his site, next to a archives link that simply yields links to different months containing posts. There’s a search bar on the top right of each page though. By the way, James wrote his own search crawler in Perl.
    If you have too much stuff going on on your site, why not hide it in a “more” link, like Henrique Dias does or Kev Quirk? It’s debatable whether or not this helps visitors find stuff, but it does make it a lot more fun to navigate and discover semi-hidden features. I think “more” is actually just “sitemap”, but whatever.
    What about related articles? My blog currently displays up to three related articles that share tags, but I’ve implemented true backlink support for other sites as well. Matt tackles this using tags as well.
    As for site navigation, some like James Ravenscroft repeats these links at the very bottom of each article so that users don’t have to scroll up if they’re interested in more. Others use a sticky navbar to circumvent this, but that’s stealing precious screen estate from your reader, and I’d advise against it.

    It’s interesting to think about: what will you display below your blog post to help navigate your visitors to related stuff, if any? What kind of search strategy are you going to implement? Or do you like linking to others right below or next to your own content? Is your archive page easy to understand? Will you paginate lists or not? What should be displayed on your front page? Are tags really that useful? Are you going to back-link or forward-link? Will there be a best-of summary each month or year that’s easy for people to find?
    Oh, and don’t neglect your RSS subscribers! Will you be adding a specific footer that links to related articles for RSS entries as well?
    Am I overthinking this? Maybe, but that’s what this place is for, isn’t it?

    tags icon

    blogging

    searching

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