Out With The Old And In With The Organized
It’s hard to believe that I started Adventures in Bentomaking eight years ago, and almost 800 posts later, I’m struggling with finding the motivation to blog. Many of my recent posts have been about this problem, and it doesn’t help that I moved all of my personal matters to my other blog, Pikko’s House. But now that I’ve converted that to my freelance editing website, I feel like I can bring my life back over here and not feel like I’m scattering myself all over the place.
AIB first started out on Blogger, and eventually I moved to WordPress, which started me down a long road of websites, an addiction I’m still trying to shake. I knew nothing about blog organization, and even years later as I tried to categorize myself neatly, I was digging myself into an awful hole of unnecessary categories and tags. I’ve moved the site to various servers over the years, and without the knowledge of how to properly move a database, many of my images are broken.
This past week I moved the site to what I hope will be my final server home, and looking at my blog structure–and knowing what I know now–I can’t help but feel disgusted at the state of Adventures in Bentomaking’s organizational structure. If you’re thinking of starting up a bento blog of your own, my advice is to avoid bloating your categories and leave the minor details to tags. Use sub-categories, and try to keep your posts in a single category if at all possible.
I sat down today and mapped out on paper how I wanted to re-organize the blog, keeping in mind what would be the most convenient structure for viewing my content on the site. While it’s going to be a while before I finally get everything ironed out, it feels good to have a specific set of goals to work towards, and I hope that going forward it’ll help any new readers browse my work in the past.
As I mentioned in my Yum-Yum Bento Box post, Maki and I are planning to pursue a sequel to the cookbook, and for that reason I need to also focus on other ways I can add to AIB, especially since I’ve added a new little one to the family since the last bento I posted. That means I have yet another new audience member to cook for, and since I now work at home, I’ll be able to get all the cute out of my system on him in a year or so. I haven’t come up with an online name for him yet.
If there’s a particular aspect of AIB that you’ve found particularly frustrating when browsing (other than broken images, since I’m well aware of that problem), please feel free to let me know and I’ll try to keep that in mind when working on it.