Finally, I’ve managed to tinker everything into place. The main changes were a new blog theme and a complete overhaul of the category structure—quite a fresh new look, wouldn’t you say?
As for the category structure, I have completely abandoned the old “Thought-History-Epic” system, and greatly reduced the number of categories as well. The new system is mainly organized by genre, and only under “Essay” have I further divided things into several major thematic categories.
When designing the category structure, I no longer thought in terms of abstract logical coherence, but instead considered when readers would actually need to click into a category. Generally speaking, readers who follow my blog long-term probably check every new post anyway and don’t need to browse by category. Friends who drop by temporarily to look up an article can use the search function and the tag function to find what they need, and they also don’t need category-based browsing. So in fact, there are not many readers who really need categories. Therefore, the category system only needs to take into account certain readers’ specific interests, and it should provide an additional dimension of distinction that search and tags cannot easily offer.
In the end, this is what I designed. First there is “Series,” which contains special columns and features—for example, if you’re a Bitcoin player and only care about Bitcoin-related posts, with no interest in philosophy of science or anything like that, then you can go straight to the Bitcoin series. Second is “Research,” which contains relatively serious academic writing, including papers and research reports. Compared with the rambling and miscellaneous essays, there are far fewer posts here. “Essay” is one of the largest sections, so I added some secondary categories there as well; “Teaching” is a relatively new type, since I’m a teacher now, and this content will probably increase in the future. Students taking my courses don’t need to pay attention to anything else—they can go straight to the course section. “Reading” includes both proper book reviews and messy notes; and the final section, “Recording,” is basically a recycling bin, where all kinds of hard-to-classify content are treated as life records.
The blog theme uses nirvana. Yes, it’s the same theme I recently used for the website I made for Tsinghua’s Department of History of Science. After fiddling with it there for quite a while, I got used to it and found it pleasant enough to look at, so I simply brought it over here. Of course, unlike the department homepage, I switched to a fresh, bright color scheme, and for the time being I haven’t adopted a homepage banner layout. The Mystique theme I had been using before has been abandoned. In fact, that theme is still one of the most powerful free themes I’ve ever seen, but unfortunately it stopped being updated five years ago.
I’ve also reduced a lot of functions that, anyway, nobody used—such as the message board and so on. Email subscription has been retained. Although this Subscribe2 plugin also hasn’t been updated for several years, its functions still seem to work properly, so I couldn’t be bothered to replace it.
The heaviest-duty new feature is the Inline Comments plugin, which provides a marginal annotation-style commenting function. I originally wanted to switch to the commentpress plugin, but that plugin requires you to change to their theme, and customizing it yourself is extremely troublesome; their theme is also a bit ugly, and its limitations are rather large. After searching around for quite a while, I finally found this small, free plugin, which basically achieves the functionality I wanted. Of course, it would also be great if it could do underlining and annotation like Kindle or Douban Reading, but on the one hand I don’t have that technology right now, and on the other hand it also seems a bit too flashy.
What’s rather sad is that my blog basically doesn’t get any comments at all now, so whether anyone will even use the annotation function is not exactly promising. Of course, I won’t let this function go to waste; at the very least, I can annotate things myself. As for the stale old posts, I won’t go back and revise them, but I may add some commentary to them myself.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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