More specific post categories now available for my blog content

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For a while, I've been trying to figure out how to manage the posts on my blog.  When I originally established my blog back in 2005, the blog creation wizard asked me to create one or more categories to classify content that I wrote.  I didn't have a clear idea about what kind of topics I wanted to write about back then, so I created some really broad categories (Setup issues, Visual Studio and .NET Framework and Windows Embedded).  I've added a few more broad categories over the past couple of years as the topics I've posted on my blog have evolved (Mailbag, Miscellaneous, Windows Media Center - General, Windows Media Center - Development and Windows Vista).

Since I started writing in this blog, I have found that I write about a wide range of topics, and only a subset of readers are really interested in each type of topic, so they'll tend to subscribe to the categories they're interested in.  I also tend to use my blog to store links to information I think is interesting and that I want to be able to find in the future, but I sometimes have a hard time finding specific links later on when I need them.

Based on these usage patterns, I think it will provide overall benefit to create a larger set of more targeted categories for my blog content.  This introduces a couple of possible problems - I don't want to go through all of my old posts that are filed in the broad categories and re-classify them.  I also don't want to break any category subscriptions that anyone might have by deleting the old categories or no longer using them.

So, I settled on a plan where I will create more specific categories, but retain the broad categories as well.  For old blog posts, if I edit them in the future I will add tags for the new categories.  I will also go through the posts that I refer people to most frequently to troubleshoot problems and add tags to them as well.  For new blog posts, I will classify them into both the new categories and the old categories I would have used if the new ones didn't exist.  Then as content builds up in the new categories, if anyone has subscriptions to the broad categories and decides they want to only get targeted information in more specific areas, they can adjust their subscriptions.

Hopefully this will provide a good step forward with the overall goal of making it easier to quickly find relevant information from this blog.

Here is an initial set of new, more specific categories that I have created:

If you have any feedback or recommendations about how to better organize the information in my blog, please leave a comment on this blog post or contact me and let me know what you think.