Organizing posts
Over the past few months I've gotten much more deliberate around how I'm organizing my posts. Here's a rough breakdown of my workflow.
Hand curation
One of the most important pieces for me is hand-curating my writing index page. I change this pretty frequently based on my mood. It's fluid.
Pagination? Nope.
Stop using pagination on your blogs
There are three primary "index pages" on my blog. The first is the main, hand curated writing page. The second is the archive which is a chronological listing of all posts. The last is each tag page.
These are all grouped already, and as such I don't see a need for any type of pagination. As such, it's easier to search and each listing is already "scoped" based on context.
Full archive
I also expose an entire writing archive in chronological order for folks that want to peruse things more linearly or even just browse stuff that I've written.
I use this myself even since some of my posts are sort of initial spikes around a topic I plan on revisiting before I add it to a curated topic.
What about really old posts?
In my content/posts directory I also have an archives dir which
I use to house posts that are old or abandoned. "Active posts" are
in the topmost directory and might be edited again.
Tags
For posts I add tags pretty liberally and use gatsby-theme-blog-tags to generate tag pages. Right now I don't link to tag pages but plan on using them for linking to curated topics as my content broadens.
Dates?
Following behind Joel's footsteps I don't add dates to my posts. The vast majority are evergreen and iterated on to keep them relevant.
Conclusion
I don't understand our obsession with chronological content. After tucking away my posts index (and referenced as an archive) it helped me better think about how to organize my writing.
I'm still tweaking things but feel like I'm honing in on something that makes sense for me.