Clean your categories

[ses5909]

on ilovecode (http://www.ilovecode.com/) i have way too many categories that take up too much real estate in the sidebar. When I first started blogging, I created a category everytime I needed one and now it's time for me to clean up my act.

Have you every cleaned up your categories? Who else has a mess of categories (there should be at least one of you answer...I've seen your blogs :D)

[pbradish]

I've needed to do this BADLY for awhile now. I probably have 15 that could be condensed down to 5.

[goldfries]

I planned out my categories and so far it's alright. :) as long as there's no more sub-categories.

[samwoodfin]

I'm down to eight categories. I reduced them, greatly, after some forum chick told me that my categories "make her blind." And, honestly, it's made it easier for me to categorize new posts.

[Dan Schulz]

What are categories? :p (that's a joke)

Seriously though, I don't use them (per se), but I do have major topics I do cover from time to time that I'm going to "categorize" when I get around to it.

[BPartch]

I try to plan it out but yes, when I first started I also just created a cat as needed, depending on the topic. I quickly learned that it is best to plan it out and before creating a new cat stop and think, do I really need to add this? Just like when installing software to try, always say do I really need to try another HTML editor. ;)

[doorlight]

I actually organized my categories last night. But still don't have plans to put it on my sidebar. :p

[Jelena]

I'm currently at 13 categories. I used to add am as I go.

How would you clean them? What would you do with posts that are published under the ones you wanted to remove?

[adalante]

I have too many categories, but i like it that way as they appear like a tag cloud in my footer :D

[shyflower]

I've been moving poetry and personal writings on Older Space to ShyRhymes with the result of deleting empty categories and in some cases, moving things around. However, I noticed on my Google Webmaster tools that I have a ton of 404 errors now. So if people are moving things around, they should remember that when you make a move, your permalink (if you use word press) changes as well. If I was going to do it again, I'd do it more slowly and write the redirects as I go.

[snookca]

In the current version of my site, I only show categories in the sidebar that I've used within the last 6 months. As the things I talk about change, so will the topics listed in my sidebar. I think it has been a reasonable approach to category cruft.

[Kirk M]

I've been taking on the task of reorganizing and cleaning up my categories in preparation for the release of WordPress 2.3 which completely chnages the structure of categories and the way they're handled. This doesn'yt mean your existing cats are in danger, to me it's just wise to get things my cats straightened out ahead of time.

Oh...and Permalink Redirect functions are now going tobe included in the WP 2.3 core so no more 404's when you change a title after publishing (typos etc)

On 404's and such. If you use WordPress as a blogging platform, you can use "Urban Girrafe's" "Redirection" plugin (just Google "Redirection plugin" as I can't insert the url at the present time) to redirect those 404's to the proper posts. The only plugin I found to cause trouble with this plugin was "Bad Behavior" which I was going to drop anyway since it causes problems in the MySQL DB

Just so ya' know. :)

[sbpoet]

I recently consolidated categories (on Watermark) by listing them on pages, and putting only five (or so?) 'umbrella' categories on the sidebar. Visitors can click & go to the page with the list.

It did clean up the sidebar.