File Maintenance – folders versus tagging
Ah, the computer age has brought us lots of great information. Trying to sift through this information can be challenging though. I’ve often thought about what are the best ways to keep digitally organized.
I imaging the following analogy:
Putting something in a folder is like folding and putting your clothes away in a dresser. It is great when it gets done, but more often than not.. you get lazy and they end up on the floor (or your desktop or junk drawer folder).
Tagging is like taking clothing to the dry cleaners. A little tag is attached to it and you write what it is and stuff so it can be found later. Then it goes wherever. To get it back you have to explain what the item is and what was on the tag so the dry cleaning guy can find it among the sea of clothing.
It sounds like tagging is a lot easier right? But, what if you are someplace where there isn’t dry cleaning.. or the dry cleaner guy doesn’t understand what you are trying to find?
This is how I see information problems occur as I use more than one computer device. On my computer I can type whatever I remembered about the item into spotlight and it finds it right away. On my iPhone I can’t carry everything so I have to figure out a way to have some information with me and keep track of what is back at home. This is where it gets complicated.
My website is facing the same issues. How can I attach the right information to each article of clothing (or post) so that I or anyone else can easily find alike items.
My blog is like an ongoing thought process, with limited organization.. just tagging it with some info so I can hopefully can retrieve it later. This versus keeping a webpage-like folder structure. This page belongs to this group which is like this group. Webpages are harder to maintain because they take time to craft because they are all about presentation. A webpage is kind of like putting those clothes I mentioned earlier in a fancy dressing room and then inside a handcrafted dressing cabinet.
It looks pretty, you have to give a tour of your house and show them the dresser and then the clothing piece.
Of course.. if you wanted to quickly add another sock or straigten up the clothing differently you’d have to go inside the proper room, move the other clothes out of the way and kind of sift through the clothing until it looks right again. Then if you wanted any type of record of you going in and straightening up, you’d have to manually write down when you were there, that you added some new socks and moved the shirts and sweaters together. Then you’d have to post that list back out in the entry of the house so your guests can see that there is now a new pair of socks you just put in.
With tagging though, you have to remember what you called all those other objects that were alike. There’s no set sock drawer per say. On the computer Spotlight can read inside of documents.. but there’s no iPhone app that works the same way (at least not one that works like it does with Finder)
I’ve mentioned this issue before & I’m probably taking the analogy too far.. but hopefully it illustrates the problem I see when trying to maintain my website or computer files. I want to make it easy to navigate and to preserve those ideas so I can come back to them later.
Right now I’m in the process of building a new house (hmatt.com 3.0, 2.0 was kind of shoddy when I built it) and trying to put some nice dresser furniture in the place (static pages) but still have the freedom to easily update it from wherever I am via wordpress (blog).
Part of the problem too is that I can kind of picture how this house could be built.. but I’m not a skilled architect, carpenter, electrician or painter. Hmm, there are other good analogies in there.
I spent a lot of my youth trying to learn about how to utilize the tools that were available at the time to build the house.. er, webpage. There was a lot of cross posting information in different places, and I learned about hand coding my website versus WYSIWYG editors (which were terrible then, or expensive).
A new iWeb is coming out later this month that finally allows one easily to upload via ftp. I know the code can still be a little bloated, but the ease of use is so.. magical (compared to what there used to be).
With regards to organizing on the computer I’ve been using a hybrid of folders and relying on search and tags. So I thought I could post a webpage that incorporates all these ways to organize.. pages with sections (like folders) a search box (like spotlight) and tags or categories to group alike things.
Great right? I hope I can come up with a simple, uncluttered way to give newcomers a tour of my website. I have a tendency though to go on and on.. as you can see.