A little blog housekeeping…

I’ve been meaning to do this for about a year and I finally made time for it. But first, here’s a yawning possum:

My blog post categories were in great need of reorganizing. What are “categories,” you ask? They’re those links that following the words “Posted in:” underneath the title of each article I put on the blog. They’re just a way of grouping posts that deal with similar subjects, in case anyone is so ridiculously bored that they want to read more than one at a time. Similarly, if you want to be sure to avoid my unenlightened views on, say, Fashion — and, seriously, you probably should — then you can easily do so by selecting all the categories that don’t have the word “Fashion” in them, which is pretty much all of them except one. (You can find a list of all the categories via the cleverly named Categories dropdown menu at the bottom of each page.)

For many years, I’ve used the following categories as catch-alls for semi-related posts: Nature and Pets & Wildlife. I was less than rigorous in using these categories, so an article about, say, avocets might end up in Nature, while another post about killdeer landed in Pets & Wildlife. Also, the latter category was getting way too big, especially with our move to the Hill Country, aka Wild Kingdom. Ants and western cottonmouths and ringtail cats might all be technically wildlife, but that grouping is really too generic for serious research, and here at the Gazette we’re all about serious research.

So, what I’ve done is created a whole slew of new categories for Wildlife (e.g. Wildlife – Birds; Wildlife – Mammals; Wildlife – Trapping; etc.), and changed the “Pets & Wildlife” category to simply “Pets” (the contents of which deal primarily with, well, you know, animals of the domesticated persuasion [not including married men]). Also, I cleaned up “Nature” (you can thank me later, Greenpeace) by removing posts that are primarily animal-related. Nature is now where you’ll find stuff about plants, weather, and phenomena or activities that don’t fit neatly anywhere else.

Sure, this may be the equivalent of rearranging the silverware drawer, but the next time you need an asparagus server, you’ll be relieved not to have to rifle through the hummus knives and cucumber juicers to get satisfaction.