Front page article recategorisation

As promised, I've been taking a look at the categories that we use for our front page articles on TLS. Their use has been largely haphazard, which is understandable, as they are a mess. There is no logical structure to them, and there do not appear to have been any instructions on which tags to use with which articles. If we want to utilise the categories better with the relaunched front page, which we do, then we need to overhaul them.

The main problem, I have noticed, is that the categories are too broad. For a predominantly Final Fantasy VII-based website, it's silly to have a catch-all "Final Fantasy VII" category, as 90% of posts will end up being filed there. Case in point: on the first page of 25 posts, 24 of them use it.

As I was trying to think of alternatives, it struck me that practically all of our posts can be described as one of three things: actual news (e.g. the new PC release), cool but unofficial things we've found from around the net (e.g. Final Fantasy VII in five minutes) and our own projects (e.g. Let's Play Dirge of Cerberus). For that reason, I propose that we create a new category hierarchy, with those three categories right at the top. Within each one, we can use sub-categories to more accurately describe what is in the post, so that, for example, Audiobooks[/B] are distinct from Let's Plays, despite them both being community projects.

Here is my first draft of what such a hierarchy could look like:

News

• Final Fantasy VII
• Compilation
• General Final Fantasy
• Non-Final Fantasy
• Square Enix

Things we've found

• Interviews
• Fan works
• Miscellaneous

Our own work

• Let's Play
• Commentaries
• Audiobooks
• Unused text
• Translations
• Community events

I'm not happy with the category names, but they are merely place-holders so I could post this on the forum. We have time to get them right before they go public.

Next, I went through the last few dozen published posts and examined how they could be filed under the new system.


A couple of notes. Firstly, there is only one item filed under Miscellaneous. That's a pretty bad name for a category, but the more I looked at the post in question (a trivia video), the more I felt it needn't have been posted at all. Not on the front page, at least; it would have been perfect for the forum. So we might not need a Miscellaneous category if we are just careful about what we post.

Secondly, you'll notice I have used Tags as well. We weren't quite sure whether we wanted to use them, but I realised that we could avoid the "too broad" problem of the categories if we do. It's entirely possible that some visitors will want to see all Dirge of Cerberus or Before Crisis posts, and by tagging the games which are mentioned in each post, we'd make that easy to do without disrupting the categorisation. The tag of Final Fantasy VII should only be used for posts which deal with the game itself, not any Compilation titles etc.

What do you think? This is an open process; feedback is essential for getting it right. So share your thoughts, whatever they might be

I absolutely agree with all of that.

Tagging seems like the best option in my opinion, I have always wondered why it's something we don't already do. On a site I'm usually looking for news on a specific game/area, most use tags to make it easier, so I don't see why we shouldn't.

I'm not sure if I have anything further to add, you seem to have covered everything really well (as always <3) but categorising/ tagging is really easy after you've written an article, so I'm more than happy to go through the backlog of my posts and recategorise/tag them when everything's been defined.

Good thinking there, Flint.

I think I always used tags with my articles, but I'm not sure if that helped.

Prince Lex said:

I'm more than happy to go through the backlog of my posts and recategorise/tag them when everything's been defined.

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I volunteered to do that for recent posts, as well as future posts where the authors themselves might not be sure what to do, but if you want to do your own, that would be grand

Technical info: All new posts are automatically sorted into a default category, and there is no workaround as a post without a category is not allowed. I guess it's no surprise when I say the default category now is 'Final Fantasy VII'. Which is a category most stories fit into, and probably why a lot of authors don't remove that category from the cat list of a post.

Ideally each post should have just one category, and then have multiple tags (if the author wants to tag). We could do something cool with the tags as a post- launch project. Like tag clouds, but less boring.

I tag my articles, however I'm sure that I'm not consistent with it as my front page posts occur too infrequently. My little article series was probably the only time I was consistent. (I'm planning on a new entry for that, by the way, with FF13-2's endgame.)

Anyway, I like this and think its a good start to making things easier to find. So, just as a test, Dissidia news would go in General FF? (Iirc, we had some decent frontpage traffic when we were posting dissidia news, incidentally.)
What about, for example, the news of the FF7 Sackboys in LittleBigPlanet 2? Where would that go?

Yes. [/poast]

On categories v.s. tags, pretty sure articles were the 'original' categorizations, and tags were added later in the 'omg lokk tag cloud' era from a few years back. There could be some synergy between the two; use categories to categorise (w00t), and tags to highlight 'themes' in the article. Can't think of any of those atm though.

Fangu said:

Ideally each post should have just one category, and then have multiple tags (if the author wants to tag).

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Tags can have parent tags, which is why I suggested the hierarchy. We wouldn't necessarily need to tag things as both "News" and "Square Enix", for example, as the Square Enix tag would be a child of the News tag.

ForceStealer said:

So, just as a test, Dissidia news would go in General FF? (Iirc, we had some decent frontpage traffic when we were posting dissidia news, incidentally.) What about, for example, the news of the FF7 Sackboys in LittleBigPlanet 2? Where would that go?

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Dissidia news would go in News - General Final Fantasy (unless we decided to make a separate category for spin-off games that are not part of the main series). As I posted above, the Sackboy story would go under Things we've found - Fan works, as it was created by a fan, isn't strictly news, and has nothing to do with us.

So should I start re-tagging now or? Happy to help re-tagging other articles for authors that are no longer here also. If you want to just give me usernames or something I can go through it when it launches.

Prince Lex said:

So should I start re-tagging now or?

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I'd suggest waiting a little bit before we start. I'd like to hear Shademp's feedback at least.

Flintlock said:

Tags can have parent tags, which is why I suggested the hierarchy. We wouldn't necessarily need to tag things as both "News" and "Square Enix", for example, as the Square Enix tag would be a child of the News tag.

Dissidia news would go in News - General Final Fantasy (unless we decided to make a separate category for spin-off games that are not part of the main series). As I posted above, the Sackboy story would go under Things we've found - Fan works, as it was created by a fan, isn't strictly news, and has nothing to do with us.

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Well actually meant the story when FF7-themed Sackboys were for sale on PSN

You are a genius Flintlock. This system is simple and elegant.

If we find that more tags should be added I guess it's simple enough to code into WordPress. The present list of tags appear to cover all ground though.

So about these three categories and the sub-tags I say...

Okay, great. Just two questions before this goes ahead:

1. Are we going to completely ditch all the old categories and tags, or should we keep some of them?

2. What are we going to call our main categories, which are "news", "things we've found" and "our own work" above? News is fine, "our own work" can easily become "community projects" or "Lifestream projects" or similar, but what "things we've found"?

1. Nah, most the categories / tags work, I think we just need to go through all the poasts / pages and re-asses their current categorization / tagging.

2. Working on the navigation, right now we have a few distinct categories; "news", "information" (like character profiles, maybe translations), and "community" (audiobooks, let's play). Wouldn't call the categories like that, but it gives a rough indication of what the site's content is made up of.

"Things We've Found" could be "Things of Interest."

"TLS Originals" for our own work? Or maybe just "From The Lifestream?"

Cthulhu said:

1. Nah, most the categories / tags work, I think we just need to go through all the poasts / pages and re-asses their current categorization / tagging.

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This answer confused me a bit. It seems like you're saying we shouldn't adopt the category structure I proposed above, and instead just work with the existing structure and make sure everything is filed properly. Is that correct? If so, that would be in contradiction with the task I was given of coming up with new categories, which you gave the green light to on IRC, if I recall correctly.

News -> Square News (this will look odd of course when the tag is "Square Enix", but the company name is the only umbrella that covers all the tags)

Things we've found -> Offsite Content

Our own work -> TLS Content ("By TLS"/"From TLS"/"From The Lifestream")


I can't come up with anything better. Just trying to help keep the ball rolling.

Shademp said:

News -> Square News (this will look odd of course when the tag is "Square Enix", but the company name is the only umbrella that covers all the tags)

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How much news do we post that isn't related to Square? I think the tag of News should be enough.

Flintlock said:

How much news do we post that isn't related to Square? I think the tag of News should be enough.

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My thought was that fan-made content may also count as "News" hence why I added the "Square" specification. But as long as the other two tags are clear enough, then "News" should be good enough yes.

Ignore my previous poast, probably not making much sense, .

I've started going through the old articles now to recategorise and tag them, and I've noticed quite a few ways in which we could improve the quality of our writing. I have already said to Shademp that I'm happy to be a copy editor for articles on TLS, but if nobody objects, I could also share some tips. Others could throw their suggestions in, and between us we'd come up with a style guide for authors. How about it?

We should probably clarify exactly what everyone's staff role is, too, but that's not so much of a priority.

As time allows, I wouldn't mind assisting you with copy editing, Flint. Seeing as I've actually done it with a newspaper before, as well as in my own work (not that I don't still make mistakes), it's second nature to me.

I'm accustomed to the Associated Press Stylebook, by the way. What would you want to use?

Hawkeye said:

I'm accustomed to the Associated Press Stylebook, by the way. What would you want to use?

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Nothing so formal, just a collection of tips for our authors, like some types of headline that should be avoided, what to put in an article's introduction, when to use "I", "We" and the passive voice, etc. Perhaps I shouldn't have called it a style guide (though for what it's worth, I usually refer to this one).

It sounds like it'd be good to have you on board doing some editing. I'd be concentrating on keeping things properly organised and well-presented, but I'm sure you would be much better when it comes to looking at the writing itself.

I'd be glad to do it. Wouldn't hurt to keep in practice until I can actually get a job doing it again.