Dorothea and I have different strategies towards category archives. As she says, The problem with running off at the keyboard the way I do is that eventually, adding a new blog entry becomes an exercise in CPU-hogging.
Her solution is to sub-divide her categories so that each has fewer entries. While I don't object to rearranging categories, and indeed I myself have done the same thing with the Life
and Life, the universe, and everything
categories, my focus is on grouping like things together rather than on file size.
Early on, I realized that my category archives would eventually grow exceedingly large, and I developed the technique of displaying the full text of a certain number of entries (currently ten) and the rest of the category's entries' titles in the left sidebar. The assumption underlying my choice is that readers of my blog are generally more interested in recent entries than in older ones, and thus a medium-length page listing the most recent entries and granting further access to older entries in the category. But maybe I'm wrong; maybe I should show excerpts of more entries (though I generally find the automatic excerpts unhelpful and am probably crap at writing custom excerpts as well), or some other format.
One idea that has just occurred to me is to include Next by category
navigation links on individual entries, in case readers want to read all my posts about this blog without going back to the category page. I would have found such links helpful, not too long ago.
My problem is that my use of this blog is very specific, and I wrote everything in it, so I pretty much know where I put it. I don't know where everyone else expects to find things. (Consider this a request for input!)
Oh, and this doesn't even touch the question of whether my categories make sense to anyone else... I'm not going there, but feel free to put in your two cents anyway.
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