I’ve recently been thinking recently about whether or not to get rid of categories on this site, and going with a strictly “tags” or keywords method. I just don’t think the categories are really doing their job. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe many people are using the Category Archives below are used at all. Apparently, I’m not the only one out there thinking about this subject for their site. Deane @ Gadgetopia was just discussing this topic, and feels that category archives are useless as well. Gadgetopia is a wee bit bigger than Hell Yeah Bitch with 4,000 posts to our 500, so their archives are a tad bigger. Deane has gone the way of capping the category archives at 20 posts. Thinking about this subject more, I’m not really a fan of that approach. Can you really call it an “archive” with only the last 20 posts? Sure, having huge archives that, of course, make for huge files and are rarely indexed by Google, but if you are only going to do that last 20 why not just take the category archives out of the picture entirely? One could go with just a tagged / keyword categorization where for each keyword you use basically makes a small category (which by the way, there are MT plugins that do that for you), or you can keep the categories, and just not make a static page archive of the posts in them.

I say keep the main category archives, which would allow for some simple high-level organization. Then use keywords and tags to allow the user to pare down that possibly huge grouping within one category. And what of the large category archive files? Dump them. Just don’t rebuild them any more. If you want to put a link on your site that allows the user to look at recent entries in that high-level category, then just make the link a search string. If they want to search via a keyword to put a finer point on that search, then they can do that.

Ok, I’ve convinced myself. Thats what I’m going to do. I think a simple re-organization of some of the categories might be in order, but unless anyone has any better ideas, then the category archives might get flushed soon.