For a while, I’ve been meaning to check out how WordPress handles category-specific feeds. Having such feeds available would free me to write boring posts like this without fearing people will spill their cornflakes as they browse the morning Software Development feed. Thus, this post is under “General”, which I will use for a confusing combination of administrivia and anything that’s not really tech. Basically non-core stuff that most people wouldn’t bother subscribing to. And if that doesn’t put you off the General entry, then please, be my guest and read on.

HumansAndTech I’m using for “high-level” software and tech stuff, like usability, podcasting, blogging, business, etc.

SoftwareDev is all the relatively low-level stuff. The two assembly programmers reading this blog will no doubt be disgusted by my use of “low-level” to refer to concepts as high-level as software methodology. Relativity.

Podcast simply indicates there’s a podcast in there, so you could use that feed for ipodder or other podcast clients. Or it’s fine to use the “All Feeds” category; the bandwidth difference will be trivial compared to the size of the MP3s. Theoretically, “Podcast” is orthogonal, as I could rabbit on about any one of “General”, “SoftwareDev”, or “HumansAndTech”. In practice, I’m keeping my podcasts on the topic of software development, so most will be SoftwareDev. (Anything on usability will be HumansAndTech.)

Hopefully, the change hasn’t caused any problems with aggregators - I refactored the categories of some old entries, but didn’t update their timestamp.

I can’t help being meta about this and pointing out that refactoring the domain model has been a win-win: users (admittedly not many of them) benefit from a structure which is coarser-grained but nonetheless satisfies most usage profiles; I gain by having to think less each time I post something.