Overview Link to heading

As this website has grown, it has become more important to find efficient ways to organize and manage the increasing number of blog posts and individual pages. Both for the sake of readers and for myself when managing the site.

Hugo, the website builder engine underlying {blogdown} and therefore this website, provides two types of built-in taxonomies to help manage this problem: tags and categories.

While I’ve added tags to posts from the very beginning, I recently started using categories and decided on how each of these should be used. This post collects and explains some of the details for interested readers, but also serves as a reminder to myself in case I forget what I had in mind.

Multilingual Mode Link to heading

Beyond tags and categories, this website is actually two websites in one: an English and a German version. Hugo’s multilingual mode has worked quite well for me so far, but it also means that I maintain separate content and taxonomies for both language versions.

Attentive readers may have noticed me posting links to my website with two separate domains:

• www.seanfobbe.com
• www.seanfobbe.de

The .com domain is in fact the primary one under which the website is hosted. The .de domain redirects to www.seanfobbe.com/de but can otherwise be used as a drop-in replacement for this subfolder and all deeplinks will be honored.

Switching between languages is also possible via the small flag icon in the top right of the website.

I try to keep both language versions as much in sync as possible, but there are exceptions:

• Sometimes it takes me a while to translate content.
• Sometimes there is very long content or strongly language-dependent content that I feel should be read in the original language; here I will link to the other language version.
• Sometimes there is content, esp. German blog posts, that is quite probably not of interest to an international audience that does not speak German; here I neither link nor translate.

If you speak both English and German and feel adventurous, try toggling between the language versions occasionally.

Tags Link to heading

All tags, including the number of posts/pages for each tag, are listed here:

https://seanfobbe.com/tags/

For tags I have come up with the following strategy:

• Tags describe thematic content
• Each blog post or page should have one or more tags, but no more than 10
• Blog posts must have tags, pages may have tags
• Tags should generalize to multiple posts, but having a large number of tags to describe thematic content is fine

During the past few days I went over the tags on a number of posts and did some cleaning, but there is still some work to be done. Expect existing tags to change for a while.

You can access thematic content by either clicking the link to the full list of tags above or any of the tags on a post, which will show similarly tagged posts.

Categories Link to heading

All categories, including the number of posts/pages for each category, are listed here:

https://seanfobbe.com/categories/

For categories I have decided on the following strategy:

• Categories describe the type of post/page
• Each blog post or page can be assigned a maximum of one (1) category¹
• Blog posts must have categories, pages may have categories
• Categories must generalize to multiple posts/pages and the number of categories should be kept small and tightly controlled

Currently I maintain the following categories:

• Announcement concerns future events (e.g. upcoming events or publications) and should always be associated with a date.
• Data collects all posts about my open data work and possible information on other data publications that may be of interest to readers.
• Essay describes long-form content. Essays are deeper reflections on certain topics, will usually contain a fair amount of opinion, sometimes math, code or diagrams and may be as long as I feel is warranted.
• Media is for past interviews, podcasts and other media appearances.
• Publications posts inform about new publications such as peer-reviewed papers, reports, articles and similar.
• Speaking is for follow-ups on academic speaking engagements, particularly for slides or recordings of talks. This category is more retrospective, upcoming events are categorized under Announcement
• Tutorial is for posts and pages with a teaching purpose.
• Website is for posts like this one, which inform about features or reflect on the state of this website.