Well I’m at it again doing some clean up of the posts topics (categories), and tags. I spent some more time thinking about what I wanted, and I felt there was a little more room for some further cleaning. Before I got started I decided to review Kev Quirk’s, and Joel’s websites to gain some insight on how they organized content. Here is what I ended up doing in a little more detail than before.
Cleaning
I created a checklist for what I wanted to do for the topics, and tags as shown below. All these changes were done to all published posts as well as drafts. Shockingly I have 51 drafts as of this post.
Each topic would be moved or changed to another topic.
- app to technology
- hacking to technology
- art to hobby
- craft to hobby
- website to web
- cyberspace to LittleBits
- household to hobby
- hardware to technology
- Unboxing to review
- 1 post to review
- 2 posts with app to adamsdesk
There wasn’t much for tags this time around.
- bash to BASH
- Remove ventoy
I began using grep, wc, and sed to help speed the process along. Combining grep along with wc helped get a
total count of posts that would be modified, so I could confirm later that sed modified the same total of posts. Using
git diff I reviewed the changes as I went along to ensure I wasn’t making any mistakes.
Here is an example of how I used grep, wc, and sed for the topic “app”.
grep -r "^category: app\$" _posts/ | wc -l
39
$ sed -i 's/category: app/category: technology/g' _posts/*.md
This is how I dealt with actually removing the entire tag, and line for “ventoy”.
$ grep -r "^ \- ventoy\$" _posts/
_posts/2021-02-09-ventoy-the-ultimate-multi-boot-manager.md
_posts/2021-02-14-how-to-create-a-multiboot-usb-with-ventoy-using-linux.md
$ sed -i '/^ - ventoy$/d' _posts/*.md
The only downside to all this was I had to change each post’s front matter for date modified, and change log manually. Unfortunately at the time of doing this I couldn’t see how I could automate those tasks since it wasn’t a simple removal or search, and replace. Some may think, and honestly I have too, why bother with the changelog? The main reason why I continue to do it is for accountability and history of changes of a post.
Stats
Here are the end results of a couple of hours of work. Not as a dramatic difference this time, but I feel better for doing it.
| Item Name | Before | After | Removed |
| Paginated pages | 51 | 44 | 7 |
| Topics (categories) | 16 | 11 | 5 |
| Tags | 29 | 28 | 1 |
This is post 77 of 100, and is round 2 of the 100 Days To Offload challenge.
References
- Blog, Wikipedia
- Old Brooms, image by Pezibear, published Jul 19, 2022
- Tag (metadata), Wikipedia
Changelog
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- change 100DaysToOffload message