Ah, the retcon.  Short for “retroactive continuity” and originally coined in the world of comic books, the retcon is a way of rewriting history.  When done well, it can take a minor plot point that has arisen of its own volition (and if you’ve ever done creative writing, you know what I mean) and turn it into its own story.  When done poorly, you get a whole lot of dubya tee eff.

My blog is filling up nicely since I actually started using it way back when.  (Note:  Like many other folks,  I’ve actually been “blogging” since long before the word was invented.  Even my earliest sites were set up in a periodical format with at least semi-regular updates, categories, etc.)  As a result, the lists of categories and tags has become rather unwieldy.  This becomes important in the context of the new site design; that category list in the center of the front page is automatically generated from the category list that powers this site. 

So, I’m cleaning things up.  Basically going through the blog by category and tag, reorganizing, and taking a somewhat different approach to the structure of things.  “Categories” are now only five:

• Entertainment – This category covers, in the broadest sense, entertainment and media including music, television, films, theatre, books and magazines of all kinds, the internet, technology
• Humor – Much of what I write is humorous in whole or in part, whether jokes or parodies or stories or what have you.  If I think it will make someone laugh, it will be in this category.
• Media – No, it’s not about the TV news channels.  This is where you’ll find videos, music, photos, and graphics either created by or featuring Me.  This includes posts about the site, like this one.
• Opinion – Social observation, religion, politics all go here, as well as product and service reviews.
• Personal – My life and the things I experience and observe while living it.

Obviously, there will be some “cross-pollination” here; any given article could potentially fall into all five categories, although the vast majority will only be in one or two.

After/as I reorganize the categories, I’m going to be looking at the tags as well, trying as best I can to narrow them to a manageable level.  Then again, given the ridiculous number of things I think about in a day, I guess it’s no surprise that after a few years my writing would become disorganized.  I suspect that there will be new tags created, too, as common themes that were previously not obvious make themselves so.

It’s also fairly certain that I’ll find some old entries I want to drop or edit because they make reference to people or events I’d rather forget, although I’m trying hard to resist that urge.

The purpose of all of this is to make the stuff I post here more readily browseable by visitors looking for particular topics or what have you.  The one caveat is that I think BlogEngine uses the categories to generated “related posts,” so I may need to re-introduce secondary categories in order to make those results more relevant.

In other site news, I’m still tweaking and fiddling throughout the place.  The line spacing in article paragraphs bugs me; in standard HTML rendering a ‘soft’ line wrap or line break is single-spaced and a ‘hard’ line wrap or carriage return (a term left over from the typewriter age) is double-spaced.  My mind is used to this, and it irritates me when I don’t see that in my posts.  It’s a CSS thing, I just have to track it down.

Also continuing to make changes to the site layout, which will hopefully include some cool toys here pretty quick.

Some day soon:  Real content~!