Diaries, diaries, diaries. We love them. We hate them. We read them. We ignore them. We look for them. We can't find them.
Can't find the type of diary you're looking for? Read on.
Yes, this is one of those many "how can we improve the dkos interface" diaries. But - this one proposes a
very simple solution.
First of all, I want to address the "oh no! the diaries are falling off the front page faster than I can sneeze" concerns.
Step 1: Take a look at the Recent Diaries box on the front page.
Step 2: Notice these 3 features at the bottom of that box:
- Show __ diaries. Set. If you like to have a front page that lists lots of diaries for you at a glance, set this number to 50 or so.
- Recent Diary List This is the feature I use most when I'm checking to see if someone has written a diary on a topic I intend to write about. It lists titles only and is a quick way to do a search. You can also use this effective method to look at summaries of diaries.
- Search Diaries Use this feature to quickly search through diaries as well, but be forewarned, it may not necessarily pick up that lone diary out there that has already covered a subject you plan to write about and it may not enable finding the subjects you are interested in reading.
Okay. That's Diary Searching 101.
Now, here's my proposal to shorten your search time even more. It's aimed at those of you who write diaries and it takes about 2.5 seconds of your time:
Add a category to your diary title.
Examples:
[Senate] Boxer needs your help!
or...
[Iraq] Election Day Violence.
Simple. Of course, it requires diarists to write concise, meaningful headlines and that, in itself is a bonus. But, it also allows those time-restrained kossacks to choose diaries quickly, based on their interests.
Sidebar: Kossack anonymous coward8 set up a categorization experiment outlined in dkosopedia which I can't quite grasp. Hopefully, he'll show up here to explain it a bit more for luddites like me.
He has also written several diary category suggestions, but I think we will need very short words in our titles compared to some he has created. Perhaps we can somehow use his system as an archive. (?) Chime in here, techies.
Here's a proposed list of title keywords (some of which I've stolen from anonymous coward8's list):
Abortion
Action
Afghan (the country, not the dog or the blankie)
Agri
Bills
Books
Breaking (you decide)
Bush
BushAdmin
Conservatives (I didn't want to shorten this to "Cons")
Court
Corp
Crime
Culture
Dems
dKos (community discussions)
DLC
DNC
DomPol (no, this is not for kinky sex talk - it's domestic policy)
Drugs
Edu
Econ (economics)
El2004
El2006
El2008
Energy
Env (environment)
Family
FDA
ForNews (foreign news)
ForPol (foreign policy)
Framing
General
Govt
Health
Help
History
House
Humo(u)r (some of use the Queen's English)
Iran
Iraq
Judicial
Justice
Labo(u)r
Law
LBGT
Libs
Media
Military
Misc
Muni (municipal issues)
NeoCons
NKorea
Other
Pentagon
Petition
Phil (philosophy)
Policy
Poverty
Pundits
Protest
Rel (religion)
Repub
Science
Senate
SS (social security)
State (state issues)
Taxes
Tech
Torture
Troops
USNews
Vets
War
Weapons
That's my quick list. No doubt, I have missed some categories. The point of this diary is to decide if kossacks think this is workable and desirable. If we take this on as an experiment, I don't think it's absolutely necessary to confine ourselves to these specific categories. The idea is to promote a bit of organization here to make it easier for all of us to find what we're looking for, so, whatever the keyword is, as long as it makes diary reading easier, I'm for it.
Thoughts?
Update [2005-1-28 16:38:41 by catnip]: kos has commented that something similar to this idea is in the works and some have suggested that perhaps we should wait. So, I have two questions:
1) Why shouldn't we use this simple system in the meantime?
2) If we do, will it affect the diary categorization system that kos eventually intends to implement? (which is tough to answer since we don't know what it is, but that's where you techies come in...)