Reconstructing the Campaign Mastery Blog
“We can make it better than it was before – better, stronger, faster.”
(Well, 2 out of 3 ain’t bad)
Well, it’s done. Almost 6½ hours of effort.
That’s what it took to completely remove and replace every category and tag, and then reassign them according to a new and comprehensive scheme of organisation that Johnn & I have been working on for over a month. The Categories should now be more consistant and – for the first time – have actually been defined in terms of the content they will contain. The tags have been re-organised, and often re-named, to make them – and the tag cloud they generate – more user-freindly both to the flesh-and-blood readers of this blog posts (AIs can take care of themselves!) and to the categorisation schemes of other blog networks.
Hopefilly, all this effort has been worthwhile, that our readers find the blog a more user-friendly environment, and that no-one in our readership has been inconvenienced in any way. (If they have, I apologise on behalf of us both). Normal service has now been resumed!
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February 3rd, 2009 at 9:56 pm
Hurrah!!!
February 5th, 2009 at 9:04 pm
I’ve been asked exactly what process was followed in updating our categories and tags; it seems we’re not alone in deciding to rationalise a system that had grown organically without any comprehensive plan in place. So here, for those who are interested, is exactly what was done and how:
Preliminary Stage 1: Decide on the new Categories.
To start with, we listed the various types of topics that we might possibly want to blog about. We then looked at rules for defining a heirarchy and decided that we wanted minimal nesting – D&D subtypes, our personal campaigns, and generic genre types were about the limits.
We then looked at the categorisation schemes of other RPG blogs, especially that of the RPGBlog.
Next, we tried various ways of lumping related material together to make major categories that would be relevant more frequently. If two categories would coincide on a given post 90% of the time, that was a good arguement for them being combined into a single category.
Finally, I checked various other blog sites and looked at their most recent posts, asking two questions: would we be likely to post a similar blog at some point, and if so, did it fit the category plan.
Preliminary Stage 2: Tags
I started by listing all the tags that we had used already. I then tried to rationalise these down to single-word terms wherever possible, often by taking it as read that ‘rpg-‘ and ‘game-‘ could be taken as read on an RPG site – if someone reads a tag labelled “mechanics”, they will tend to read it as “game mechanics”.
Next, we had decided that we wanted the tags to match an appropriate category at RPGBlog if the category itself wasn’t a one-to-one match. So I went through all the categories from RPG Blog and generated a list of standard tags that would be used every time a blog was placed in a given category. A little bit of flexibility was necessary, most of these ended up being a list of “and/or” statements.
Next, I removed from the old tag list anything that was identical to, or synonimous with, one of the new tags and generated a list of ‘tag synonyms’. That left only a few tags that had no equivalence under the new tagging scheme and which needed to be added to the list of new tags.
I then alphabetised the list of new tags and wrote definitions for each. By looking at the sum total of everything involved in writing an RPG, running an RPG, etc, and the various discussions that I had looked at back at the end of Stage 1 (on other sites), a few missing pieces like “Rules-Theory” became evident, and were added to the list.
Preliminary Stage 3: Blog Assessment
I then assessed each blog entry that had been posted, listing five things: the name of the post, the existing categories and tags, and with space left for the new categories and tags.
I then used the tag synonims to convert the old list of tags for each post into a list of new tags. I went through each of the category definitions and asked whether or not the blog post fell into that category, and if so, added it to the list of new categories under which the blog was to be filed. Next, I looked up all the old categories to check that the equivalent new category was on the list, discovering a couple of posts that were mis-categorised and a couple of posts which needed additional categories. The manditory tags for each category were then checked and the most appropriate one or ones were added to the “new tags’ list for that blog entry if they weren’t there already. Finally, I checked each of the new tag definitions for any others that should be included.
That gave me a list of new categories, a list of new tags, definitions for both, and a list of blogs with the specific categories and tags that were to be associated with each existing blog entry.
Action Stage 1: Delete all categories from the system. All posts were automatically reassigned by WordPress into “uncategorised”.
Action Stage 2: Create all the new categories.
Action Stage 3: Delete all tags from the system. That also automatically removed them from each blog where they had previously been assigned. It also emptied the blog cloud.
Action Stage 4: Create all the new tags that had been defined, even if they had not yet been used in a blog.
Action Stage 5: Under blog management, get a list of blogs in date order of posting. This matched exactly the list of blogs that I had prepared. One blog at a time, edit it to file it under the new categories and allocate the new tags. Save the update and then preview it to make sure everything was fine before moving on to the next.
That was it – task complete. 20 blogs took 6½ hours to process, but my PC is slow by modern standards; I spent a lot of time waiting. If you have a fast PC and a good internet connection, it might take only a minute or two for each Blog, provided that you’ve done your prep work. I had fewer problems than I had expected, so it took less time than it might have done, and that I had allowed.
If you had a huge number of blogs to process – Campaign Mastery didn’t – then it might be well to create an “Archived” category and move everything older than six months or whatever into that one category rather than handling each individually. As newer blog entries refer back to specific blogs, full tag and category assignments can be made. If you are time limited, process your blogs in order newest to oldest in the Action stages; that way, if you are forced to stop for a while, at least the most recent posts have been done. Using this method, you should be able to break up the “action” stages into bundles of 10 or 12 blogs at a time, ie do a little each day until everything is complete.