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February 7, 2009

January 1, 2008

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files / organization

I imaging this analogy: putting something in a folder is like putting your clothes away. It is great when it gets done, but more often than not.. you get lazy and they end up on the floor.

Tagging is like taking a pen and marking what it is to the item itself and then telling a butler to go get the thing.. and then describing it like GREEN SHIRT. Well this is awesome right!? Except when using more than one computer device...

a desktop or laptop seems cumbersome now that I have an iPhone. I still like having my little macbook, but it has VERY limited storage

Then in information for website I have somethings similar..

Blog is like a on the go thought, with limited organization.. just tagging it with some info so I can hopefully have my butler go find it for me... versus keeping the folder structure.. and harder to maintain and keep up with pages. A webpage can look much prettier. Kind of like putting those clothes in a fancy dressing room and then in a dressing cabinet.

Of course.. if you wanted to quickly add a sock or straigten up the clothing you’d have to go inside the proper room. Move the other clothes out of the way and kind of sift through the socks. Then if you wanted any type of history, you’d have to manually write down when you were there adding a sock and then have to post it back out in the lobby of the house so your guests can see that there is a new sock you just put in.

With tagging you have to remember what you’ve used all the time and you have to tag it in a way that will allow you to remember what it was about it. 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’m probably taking this analogy too far.. but hopefully it illustrates the problem I see when trying to maintain my website, make it easy to navigate.. and preserve my 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) and trying to put some nice furniture in the place (static pages) but still have the freedom to easily update it from wherever I am via wordpress.

Part of the problem too is that I can kind of picture how this house could be built.. but I’m not a skilled blueprint maker, carpenter, or electrician.

I spent a lot of my youth trying to utilize the tools that were available. There was a lot of cross posting information in different places as websites didn’t have many API types of things..

The pros & cons of wordpress

Pro

Easy to update after everything is in place. There are lots of interesting plugins available

Complete customization

Cons

You have to like, test it out all the time and prod it to see if it will break

It seems like wordpress is meant for a COMPLETE website. There are ways to make pages or posts..

Making a template for each category seems problematic. I have all these fun ideas on how to display the content for the various categories, and I tried using plugins.. but man... wordress template editing is no where NEAR WYSIWYG editing. I hope iWeb incorporates that.. maybe it will!

I’m still struggling with the difference between a category and a tag.. they are so similar.. kind of like events and albums in iphoto I suppose.

In organizing stuff online and on the computer I’ve come across a hybrid of using folders and relying on search and tags.

Folders

These are great so you know exactly where to go. You have to come up with a great structure and stick with it.

Tags, searching

Using Apple’s spotlight or tagging and then connecting things that way