If you visited TheWhineSeller.com on Sunday night, you may have noticed that I completely broke it. It all started innocently enough, I was trying to clean up the categories a little. Specifically, I’ve just been adding them willy nilly as I felt I needed them over the years and there were close to 300 categories on the site, many of which were either duplicates of each other or so general as to be useless. (“Selling Online” was a category. That’s the topic of the entire blog. Literally every post on this entire site would fit in that one.)

housekeeping photo

Photo by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

But, alas, there’s a known issue with the Category to Tags converter that can wipe out all of your categories and, as it was not known by me, that’s exactly what it did. Eight years of posts all lost their categorizes. I was not best pleased. Anyway, the site is fixed now and I’ve reduced the number of categorizes down to a mere fifteen. The biggest change for you readers is that there is no longer a category for every single site I write about since I realized you could just find them by tags or search anyway. Then, because I was on a roll, I did the same for my other site, Unpublishable Pennings, which was an even bigger mess because it’s actually four different blogs from several decades of my internet life that I slammed together into one and never really fixed. I’ve got a host of tips about cleaning up your categories that I learned from this that I’ll share in another post. The biggest one is: back everything up all the time OMG!

Anyway, navigation should be much easier now. You can see which categories are left by hovering over Topics in the top navbar. And I won’t spend nearly as much time trying to figure out where to put posts. The only downside is that, with the breaking and the fixing and the merging, I’m willing to bet stuff went into the wrong categories. The site is much too big for me to go back and fit every single post so I’m just going to have to rely on you guys if you notice something that seems misfiled or missing from a certain category.

The biggest navigation problem at the moment is that I used to use a plugin that automatically added tags and I realized going through the site that it added a lot of really stupid tags over the years. I really need to go through and delete some of these junk tags but it’s not a high priority at the moment. Additionally, I mentioned earlier that I’m not in love with any of the series plugins I’ve tried. The series post are kind of a mess on the site, though they look OK in the RSS feed, so I apologize for that and am trying to find a better way to do that in the future.

I’ve got a couple of questions about when you’ll be able to purchase advertising on the site again directly from me and the answer is, soon. In the meantime, you can target this site using Google Adsense.

Lastly, I’ve added some new sharing tools on the left side when you’re on the site proper that I’m hoping will help increase shares and traffic a little. These shouldn’t slow down the site but if you experience issues, or just otherwise find them annoying, please let me know and I’ll reevaluate. I’ve also been experimenting with sharing links to new content more than once a day in social media. I’m trying to find that sweet spot between increasing traffic and not annoying the readers I’ve already got so it’s a work in progress. As always, feel free to speak up if something is or isn’t working for you.

Of course, literally as I’m writing this post, I had to move over to writing this in Gmail because GoDaddy’s servers went down and my site is gone again which just goes to show… something. That the course of true blogging never did run smooth? Yeah, OK, let’s go with that… 😉