The Wild Wild Web

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    Categorizing websites with tags

     rainbow separator
    When I started this project, I decided to organize websites in a tree-like structure of categories and sub-categories. For example, the ~/libraries category had a "~/libraries/books" sub-category. After all, the Wild Wild Web is a web directory, so it made sense to organize websites like a filesystem.

    Well, today I killed sub-categories and I replaced it with tags. There are a lot of general pros & cons of using folders vs tags vs both when organizing stuff. For the Wild Wild Web, with stuff being websites, it really makes sense to use tags:

    - For a curator, working with tags is easier and more flexible. Moving websites in a tree of sub-categories is more involved.

    - For a visitor, finding interesting websites with tags is simpler: you can combine them for advanced filtering and they have pretty colors. Moving into sub-categories to discover websites felt clunky.

    - A website usually has a main topic (ex: a library of things) and maybe a few sub-topics. For example, Internet Archive is a library of texts, movies, software, etc. It doesn't need to be more complicated than that.

    Technically, I could have kept both features, but it would have made my developer life harder. I'm really trying to keep it simple with this project, so... bye bye sub-categories!
    - j0d1,