My concept for New Eden Source is an accessible archive. I’m not trying to make a community site where people spend their online lives. I’m trying to make an open and complete access point to archive and record these blogs. I have an entire stack of links to add. Blogs that have risen and died, often with only a handful of posts on them. But those posts often show interesting or focused moments in Eve for someone, somewhere.
Reading the initial comments from the weekend some people are interested in more categories. I found this interesting. I was going to a simple, easily navigable structure so I have been wary of layering and relayering links into a nest. So, I have not quite figured out visual structure.
What I have also not figured out if how to do categories. Lots of blogs fall under multiple categories. Few blogs are one thing. Many are focused but that focus crosses several items. I talk about low sec, the market, pvp, and I ramble my thoughts out in walls of unending text. Do people want to see categories and then the blogs show up under multiple ones that they seem to cross? It seems to be a very messy project. Not undoable or hard. I simply cannot figure out a way for it to be neat unless people want something like Category to Alphabetical to Blog List and wash rinse and repeat so that each category then has an alphabetical list of blogs. Then, is that one singular alphabetical list or do they want each alphabetical list broken into individual pages?
It is a somewhat daunting task but not hard to do. It will just take a few weeks to chew through all of the subject matter. I’m also not personally in love with blog categories. I tend to like someone’s writing or I don’t and that causes me to read it or not read it. But, I’m aware enough to understand that not everyone is going to follow my method of decision making so I want to create a hybrid that is easy to use and access for other people and not so irritating that I bite the head off of my own project.
Somewhere in that nattering I’ve asked people to explain to me, a bit more comprehensively, what they want or consider categories to be and how they want them to look. I know what I want and I’ve been creating and adding to that. But what I also want is usability and accessibility from the community that will hopefully find this to be a useful resource. That is why I am asking. If I don’t get anything I’ll just go on my own path and no categories!
The other thing that I’d like to do, I think, is add a feed somewhere that has currently updated blogs. I have absolutely no idea how to do that so it is still a pipe dream until I further my education a bit in the areas of more interactive abilities.
In the category concept should I filter out the active blogs into a singular or again separated, alphabetical list? Create an archive/inactive vs active split?
On the topic of sites popping up. I think that is a good thing. The greatest negative about the Eve Bloggers portal was that for a time it was the only main list being kept. I’ve heard of other’s that have risen and died. One that hosted blogs and one day vanished and all of its blogs with it. I’m in favor of sites like wordpress and blogger and live journal and tumblr because they are independent companies who will host your stuff forever. I have a personal Live Journal that I started writing in 1999 that is still up and readable. I kept it updated for about five years. My personal journal from before that was hosted on a site run by myself and some friends and that is now gone. Everyone should archive their items periodically as well in more than one place, IMO. But more than one major list means that more searches wil be caught and eyes filter into the vast pool of information that is here.
Even after people move away from Eve or away from blogging the time, care, passion and interest that they put into their project still exists. It is sad when they vanish permanently. I’ve always been a history and library geek. I’m not surprised that it is spilling over into Eve.
I think alphabetical and separated into active vs inactive would be the most useful. Like you said, there are precious few blogs that are only one topic. That said, you could still group them by topic also, going by the particular blog's stated focus along with a caveat that the categories are focus only and not necessarily the only thing the blog in question talks about.
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