More on blog categories

For discussion.
What should we call the External category instead of External? Suggestions in the running:

  • Did you know? (or some variation?)
  • Other ideas?

Do we need an All LIS category?

8 thoughts on “More on blog categories

  1. Barbara

    For a LIS staff person who very occasionally wants to post, I don’t think this clearly shows them that it’s the right category to choose for “outside of LIS” use.

    I understand the logic of not needing “LIS internal” as a category – it’s the default – but I think it’s not intuitive.

    Maybe “Tell the world” and “LIS internal” are more explicit.
    The instruction piece could then be limited to reminding posters to use one or both categories each time.

    Reply
  2. Jess Isler

    Dan Frostman just pointed out that there is an implicit requirement here that all posts be assigned at least one category. If not, then this is probably a moot point. But I think we do want to require at least one category (more than one is possible, but optional), and tags should not required but may be used at will. Sorry if we already agreed upon that in our meeting and I just forgot!

    Suggestions from Dan:
    Bigger picture
    Everything else

    Some from me:
    Worldview
    Worldwide
    Everything

    p.s. I really like Tell the world!

    Reply
  3. Carrie Macfarlane

    I like “tell the world” and “did you know.” I think I prefer “did you know,” and not just because I suggested it! It makes sense to the reader. The name of the category will be the name of the page, and it will be in the URL too. (See the circ blog page for the category “Student employees-Armstrong” for example http://sites.middlebury.edu/circservices/category/student-employees-armstrong/.) If we had a category called “Did you know” then the name of the page would be “Did you know? — Library and Information Services.” And that makes sense to the reader, and that’s who the page is for.

    I do like “tell the world,” though, and I could be talked out of the “did you know” type category.

    I think that providing a category called something like “internal” will give people the impression that their post won’t be shared with others, so I don’t think we should provide it. All posts will go somewhere, no matter how (or even if) they’re categorized. I don’t think it’s possible to require a category, is it?

    Reply
  4. Jess Isler

    Why would it be a bad thing to require a category designation? By require I mean that we say to contributors “please include at least one category for your posts”. Not because the system makes it a requirement, and not because not having a category would mean they would somehow get lost in the Blog ether, but because doing so would make it easier for subscribers to focus their reading time on content that they care about. If the categories we proposed don’t cover the majority of potential postings, then maybe we should add some more.

    I thought we decided in our meeting that the internal label was redundant and unnecessary because all posts are by default internal, and only things that are outward-facing would require a label like tell the world/did you know.

    Reply
  5. Carrie Macfarlane

    I agree that we should tell users to assign at least one category to their posts. (I thought that by “require” you might mean that the post wouldn’t go live if it didn’t have a category–and I wasn’t sure that kind of a requirement was technically possible.)

    We did decide in our meeting that the “internal” label was redundant. I think Barbara had some second thoughts, but I still agree with the decision we made in the meeting.

    Reply
  6. Jess Isler

    The requirement question is interesting. I don’t think it is possible to require the user to add a category–BUT–you can set a default category for all posts in the admin area>settings>writing. Not that that is what we want to do… but I think that’s the closest thing to having a system requirement like you were wondering about.

    FYI, ours is currently set to default as “Uncategorized”.

    Reply
  7. Elin Waagen

    Just a head’s up that I added a “One-Blog” section to the web team main page on the wiki – – tried to gather the thoughts presented here and in meetings – in one place. Please feel free to edit – we’ll need to decide on a few things before we vote on the one-blog readiness.
    https://mediawiki.middlebury.edu/wiki/LIS/LIS_Website#The_One_LIS_Blog_-_Architecture
    Thanks Barbara and Jess for adding Q&A one-blog stuff to the contacts page – realize there may be some overlap…

    Reply

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