Fiction Organization
I made a WordPress page containing a list of all the fiction I’ve published on this blog. I had to do this by hand, because it appears difficult to get a reasonable list using various WordPress approaches (such as tags). The page I created is hardly a masterpiece of user interface design (I hope to improve it significantly over time), but it’s better than what was there previously.
I will end up making it more complicated from a code point of view, because I want to be able to display by each link the publication date and some of the tags of the piece—and I don’t want to have to edit those by hand. This mix of manual selection and arbitrary tagging isn’t handled very well by the current WordPress functionality, which isn’t that surprising. I did think it would be slightly easier to achieve than it looks like it will be, however.
The series plugin I hope to write at some point would address some of the issues, by making it easy to get a list of links to each piece in a series, but even that wouldn’t address the lists that aren’t series.
One of the problems is with tagging. Partly it’s a nomenclature/overloading issue: I use the “fiction” and “writing” tags to mean not just my fiction and writing, but also the works of others and commentary on fiction and writing. For some reason the notion of a “my fiction” tag is unappealing to me.
The notion of a “my favorites” tag even less appealing. I don’t mind putting together a list of the pieces that I’m most happy with, but somehow tagging each one of them as a favorite seems extremely cheesy. That might be nomenclature again, and I could perhaps get around it somehow by having a less cloying name for the tag. I need to think about that one further and see if I can figure out just what the problem is.
Until I do, though, having all of my fiction work handily linked from one page is a significant advance (the power of HTML!). Use it to find stories of mine to read or re-read—and, hopefully, enjoy.
25 May 2009 at 02:40
How about “highlighted” instead of “my favourites”?