Tim Bray notes much discussion about taxonomies for organizing one’s blog entries, akin to those categories you see on the left of this blog. My big concern is that as content fills this blog, and I want to do some reorganization, I can’t, because that would break too many URIs unless I then commit to doing HTTP rewrites to keep it all straight. Another option would be to move from using the taxonomy as part of the permanent URI of the entry, and instead use the date.

Ported/Archived Responses

Joseph Reagle on 2003-11-29

I’m not too worried about complicated/mutual taxonomies, just being able to reorganie them as the content fills.

I’d use time as my permalink, but I’m not sure it’d work with the other tools like the commenting and trackback…

Gordon Weakliem on 2003-11-28

The question is, I think, how you do permalinks.  I’d say that using category (taxonomy) is a bad idea in a permalink - date, post ID, guid, whatever, but not category.  As far as a weblog, the guarantee you offer is thet your permalink won’t change.  Categories are a convenience to readers/subscribers, but I don’t think they offer the same guarantee as a permalink.

FWIW, I think that blosxom descended weblogs have a serious limitation with category, namely that there can be only one (unless you can use filesystem links to achieve the same thing, I think that it might work but it’d probably mess up Pyblosxom’s entry selection routine).  If you want to get into categorizatino the way Tim does, I don’t think that (py)blosxom will get you there, at least not easily.