Thoughts on Notes/Blog/Personal Website Directory Structure
:wave: everyone, I've been thinking about where to put non-technical blog posts and what to call them since, so far, I have bookmark/, cheatsheet/, howto/, note/, snippet/ and tutorial/ folders already[1].
I think those cover most of the things I like writing about and I intend to share, but I also enjoy poetry, analyzing movies, political commentary and writing an essay here and there.
Following from that, I kept essay/, poem/ and commentary/ around for whenever I felt like sharing some of my non-technical writings, but I don't like those folders :smile:. They seem way too granular, more akin to tags than categories, both of which are contained in each file's metadata.
Tags, however, don't feel like a "pillar"/category of a Zettelkasten/ramblings/thoughts crate. They're empty at the moment and in draft/, so it's the perfect chance to do some re-structuring and avoid the issues I faced when I ditched blog/category and chose the current structure.
In case you're asking yourself why I didn't put everything in the same folder, as they reflect categories and each .md file has category metadata already, it's because the drafts in draft/ became unmanageable (+120). So, in an effort to give myself an easier way to navigate and edit, I decided /folders were going to reflect the categories that existed. I'm aware it can be that after note #50 or something I have the same problem, and thus it wouldn't have made a difference whether notes were together with tutorials or not. I've decided to deal with that problem when it arises :)
I'd be very interested in hearing your thoughts! Would you keep essay/, poem/ and commentary/ or merge them into something else? note/ are short and wouldn't feel right for longer ramblings. I am not a big fan of writings/ as everything is a "writing", prose/ also doesn't quite fit and so far the only one I've sort of liked is reflection/ since essays, poems, and comments on happenings are the result of reflecting.
/rant over, I know, I'm overthinking it. Let those not guilty throw the first stone :)
[1] I've removed quite a bit of the irrelevant stuff but kept what I believe is relevant, but feel free to ask away in case something necessary is missing.
.
├── bookmark/
│ └── sample.md
├── cheatsheet/
│ ├── sample.md
│ └── sample.md-data
├── commentary/
├── draft/
│ ├── bookmark/
│ │ └── sample.md
│ ├── cheatsheet/
│ │ └── sample.md
│ └── ...
├── essay/
├── extra/
│ ├── archive/
│ ├── blob/
│ └── robots.txt
├── howto/
│ └── sample.md
├── note/
│ └── sample.md
├── poem
├── private/
│ └── sample.md
├── snippet/
│ └── sample.md
└── tutorial/
├── sample.md
└── sample.md-data/
├── sample.png
└── ...
I put everything that doesn't have a good top-level (I have 3) into /blog/YYYY/DDD-something and then use tags. My content is Markdown+YAML headers. All musings go in Blog and get multiple tags. To see all the content view /blog/tag/$TAG
What are the three top levels? (pages, projects, publications?)
Thanks !
So you separate/order by date instead of by category (excluding those three mentioned above).
Sigh, seems like a pickle to me, I wanted to avoid separating content files by date, but we'll see, seems like I'm heading that way.
Naming things is hard; organizing is hard - it's why I went with tags vs taxonomy .
I mostly talk about business (/biz) , software (/dev) and sys-admin (/sys). And have some organized content there.
While I think it's a great idea to separate things like this based on the content, I think that it is important to consider how people are likely to consume a blog. Almost everyone expects there to be a singular feed, and to consume things in a time-based fashion. Is it worth overriding the expectations of readers because of how you want to organize information?
That's a legitimate question, by the way, I'm not asking to push a point. If you answer it, then you'll know whether to add more and different directories / categories, or to move to a more singular standard blog approach and use a tag taxonomy.
Thank you for this, you're totally fine! This is the sort of back and forth I was looking forward to.
I believe the "#root", "Latest from the Blog" as well as the categories allow people to discover what they want to see and since those are in turn sorted chronologically it should not deviate too much from their expectations. Would you agree with that statement?
When I started blogging, it was using Wordpress on a free-tier PHP hosting but eventually I migrated to static hosting with github.io. Though most people advised me to stick to a custom domain, I somehow feel github.io to be cool, nerdy and illuminatus! Anyway, the Wordpress legacy and need to maintain URL compatibility means I'm sticking to
/blog/<year>/<month-number>/<slug>.html. But yes, your pattern makes more sense and is more organized.That's an interesting point! As with any system, early decisions can have an unintended and considerable impact further down the road.
I feel like this pattern encourages a perception of content that is intrinsically ephemeral, seeing as we ( am I the only one?) tend to consider newer content better content. Labeling and organizing content according to date of creation seems like it would show readers what to avoid but add little value in reality. What are your thoughts?
Unfortunately, i took down a bunch of old blog posts, so don't have much of anything to show you... Sorry.
But, for many years, i went through numerous iterations of how to organize content published online...and after a while, i just said "to hell with this"! It became less valuable for me to organize things to such a degree. I was spending too much time on what i think others have called "org porn", and not enough time actually writing/creating! :-)
Nowadays, i start with a simple /posts subdirectory and each piece of content lives in a subdir below that - regardless if something is an essay or full blown blog post or a note or whatever...So a blog post would live under /posts/some-blog-post (specifically as posts/some-blog-post/index.html or index.php, etc.), while a note might live under /posts/some-random-note, while a poem might live under /posts/whatever-title-for-haiku-poem, and so on and so on. And, if/when i outgrow that organization, at that point is when i consider to scale things a bit more...and if needed create relevant redirects from some old entries or subdir under this /posts/ hierarchy to point to specific other/future urls...but, guess what, i have not outgrown this org yet...although i will admit that I have drastically reduced my online publishing and now almost exclusively publish stuff that is more offline. My suggestion here for you: sure, spend a tiny bit of time to organize things, and then stop, and move to the more valuable activity - publishing your great content! You can always evolve your content's org at a future date. And, if you have soooo much content that it becomes unwieldy, then that's a good problem to have; it means you have lots of great content!
🥲
I agree, I think I'm going with
reflection/and see how I fare further down the line. That plus the categories I have already will likely cover all my needs for the foreseeable future.I think that sets you on the right path forward! Kudos!
We'll see, hope I don't have to get a bunch of redirects going anytime soon! :)