The original post is at:
http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/08/how-can-we-sort-our-blog-posts/
We’ve now published hundreds of posts since we started work on Overgrowth but because blogs are basically chronological streams of information, newcomers to the site tend to miss the old but useful posts. While I don’t mind fishing up old links for people on Meebo, I think it’s fair to assume that not everyone who has questions about Overgrowth actually makes it over to the live chat widget. Thus we’d like to ask for help coming up with ways to make our useful posts easier to reach:
http://cdn.wolfire.com/blog/sort2.jpg
Categories
We do have the category system lurking there on the right side of the blog. Perhaps offering a greater number of more detailed categories would help people sift through our information. However, in the past year, I think I’ve only heard categories referenced once in IRC as a useful way to filter the blog so my hunch is that no one uses our categories anyway.
Blog Search Box
It’s also good to remember the blog search box as well, but I find that when I’m looking for a post and don’t remember the exact title, I get a lot of results that are not what I’m looking for. To see what I mean, try searching for “Terrain”. Alpha 36 shows up, the fan interview we did shows up and the actual stuff about the Overgrowth terrain technology is fairly well hidden among random posts.
Meta Pages
The main solution we’ve thought of is to use meta pages to link the best of previous posts together. Say you’d like a friendly way to learn about Overgrowth’s “key features”. Clicking on the Game Tech category would get you an intimidating laundry list of technology-related posts. However, let’s say we replaced the Game Tech link with a “Key Features” link and now clicking it sends you to a pretty page with clean paragraphs describing each OG feature at a macro level. Within each paragraph all the technical terms could now link to the original posts that describe them.
This meta structure seems like a perfect way to integrate the best of the Game Tech posts and might be able to unite the “hottest” posts in other genres as well.
Other Ideas?
Space on the blog sidebar is very limited. So if categories are indeed useless, we’d like to implement something better. What do you think of our meta connector page idea? Can you think of any other good ideas for sorting a blog? Links to the successful techniques of other blogs would be greatly appreciated.