Shanghai Tech WriterTechnical Writing, Technology, WordPress, Web 2.0, National Instruments, LabVIEW, Shanghai, China

Recently, I migrated this blog from the old domain (http://www.blindmansfaith.com/NISH) to the new domain, Shanghai Tech Writer. On top of that, I upgraded the blog from WordPress 2.3 to WordPress 2.5.1. The migration and upgrade for the most part was pretty smooth but there were still a few cleanups I had to do.

1. I updated all the permalinks within the post to point to the new domain.
2. I created a new Feedburner feed. The old feed still works but I wanted to remove the word ‘NISH’ from the domain and feed altogether for long-term blogging strategy.
3. I modified a few theme templates that had links pointing to the old domain.
4. I upgraded a few plugins that had WordPress 2.5.1 compatibility upgrade. Some plugins were not 2.5-compatible so I had to remove them and find alternative plugins.
5. I added a redirection to point all readers who are still visiting the old domain to the new domain. The old domain is not accessible anymore.
6. I imported all the tags that were created using Christine’s Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin to WordPress 2.5.1’s own tag database.

In the process of importing all my tags, all the categories and tags got lumped together. It was a mess. I don’t usually use categories except for posts that were part of a series. I prefer using the tagging system as I could use many tags, or keywords, and not be limited to categories that are more topic-specific. However, something happened during the migration and WordPress couldn’t tell the difference between my tags, categories, and series. I lost all the information regarding which posts belonged to which series/categories.

In the process of cleaning up the mess, I decided that I should follow the examples of other blogs and add categories back to my posts. In the beginning when I started blogging, I used to use categories but later completely switched to using tags. I find tags easier to use and navigate because I can include many keywords that may or may not be related to technical writing/technology or the post topic. I can use a tag cloud to display all the tags or the most popular tags in varying size and color.

However, I realized that if I want this blog to have a specific purpose, objective, and target audience/readers, I need to include topic-related categories such as technical communication/writing, working in Shanghai/China, grammar & style, software & tools, and the like. Organizing the posts by categories makes it easier for readers to search/read posts that are more topic-specific instead of keyword-specific. Keywords are too general.

So I spent hours going through each post to add appropriate categories. It’s a tedious process because I couldn’t just check a number of posts and click some magic “add post to XXX category” button, like with Gmail. I had to manually open each post, add categories one at a time, and save each post.

In addition, I added the category list to the sidebar. After adding categories to the sidebar, I discovered another usability/readability issue. I had quite a long list of categories and my sidebar became ridiculously long. I decided to add a second sidebar to shorten the length. That I meant I had to modify all the theme templates. Thank goodness I’ve mastered the art of tweaking WordPress templates from my trial-and-error experiences the past few years. Otherwise, I’d never have figured out how to add the second sidebar.

Anyway, I’ve finished modifying all the theme templates. The two sidebars look great and all the categories are now shown on the first sidebar. Hopefully, this category sidebar will make it easier for readers to find topics/posts that they are interested in learning more about. I also added a new welcome/about me section on the sidebar.

I’m quite happy with this new change!

All this work (15+ hours) to make Shanghai Tech Writer blog more user/reader-friendly. And who will notice the change? Probably no one. Just like writing technical documentation, blogging is hard work and our work often goes unnoticed.

Sigh . . .

But I love it nonetheless!