Little by little I’ve been tackling some of the functional needs for this site. As I went through the initial look at the analytics for my blog and site related to content (see Personal Blog Data Analysis - Looking at 25 Years) I see needs from a use perspective from visitor / reader perspectives. I have many categories (210 as of today) and most posts have at least two categories on them. Categories are a means for a reader to click on them and find more posts that are similar, or contain similar content. Some of the categories have more than 100 posts and there needs to be a means to filter those down somewhat sanely. The two options I’ve leaned into are time ranges and co-categories. I have started framing out the both of these filters in the vanderwal.net Lab and the Lab’s Category Tests :: Lab :: vanderwal.net (go to the Category Testing Page Filtering) to get to the testing of the iterations. Filtering Options With 25 years of blog posts and coming up on 2,200 posts breaking down the years as one filtering option is to filter by year ranges. There is a heavy volume and velocity of posts in the first 7 years and then it slowed down. Trying to get consistent year ranges and having most year ranges have posts, which still narrows the number of posts, was one of the main goals. The happy spot seemed to be around a range of 5 years with the aim of the start of the year range being the “0” and “5” year as the start of the range (this theme will resurface more with other restructurings). The co-categories from a surfacing and selecting perspective is decent, but some categories have long lists of co-categories. Currently selecting a radio button triggers the change if the user’s browser has JavaScript on, but the filter button to select the filter at the bottom of the list works even if JavaScript is off. I still have tweaks I want to iterate through and those will continue in the Lab. The listing of the active filters is something I need to improve as well as adding a button to clear the filters. More Modifications for the Page One thing that will be coming in the near future is the unfiltered category page will have a distribution chart at the top of the page, like a larger sparkline with labelling (hopefully) for years or year ranges. Once this is added and the filtering is in a good spot, the modifications will move to production from the Lab. Farther down the line a category definition will be added to the page at some point. The database has been set for a while to handle this. The backend management needs to get built and the category pages need to get enabled for to surface the definitions. Then the definitions need to get written as the definitions are not dictionary definitions, but definitions of “the what”, but also how they are applied.