Meat and Milk

I make a habit of posting here every day and I have been doing so for the majority of the five years that I have been blogging. As a result, to date I have 1,872 posts on this blog!

Now, not all of these posts are substantial posts. Every Monday I post a music video (“Music Mondays”), every Wednesday I post an inspiring quotation (“Wise Words on Wednesday”) and every Friday I post a funny picture or video related to the Faith (“Friday Frivolity”). Not only that, I often advertise other people’s websites and articles. However, mixed in with all these simple posts are the more substantive articles which I have written.

For quite some time now I have been concerned that many of my old posts now go unread because they’re mixed in with all these other posts and are therefore hard to find. One reader sent me a message saying that, once he discovered my blog, he went back to the very beginning and read through all of them! While that’s impressive dedication, I doubt many would do that. I recently set about taking some steps towards remedying this situation and making my more substantial articles more easily available…

Step #1: Tagging

Every blog post has a set of tags. These are keywords used to annotate each post in an attempt to describe the contents of the article:

These tags are used when doing a keyword search on the blog and they are also used in the Tag Cloud widget, which appears on the right-hand margin of the blog.

In the Tag Cloud, the greater number of articles tagged with a particular word or phrase, the larger the font of that word/phrase.

As you can see from the screenshot, a large number of articles have been tagged with the word “featured”. This is because, over the last week, I worked my way through every…single…blog post, tagging all them with the “featured” tag if they contained any of the following:

(a) A substantial article

(b) A video/MP3 of me speaking

(c) A meme which I created.

I ended up tagging over six hundred posts. Now that all the substantial content is tagged, the readers can readily access all the content which I have directly created.

Step #2: Redesigned Menus

Those eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that this blog’s the menu bar has recently changed. I previously had a very expansive menu system, but this has now been replaced with a far simpler one:

The menu items are as follows:

If you click on “Featured Articles”, the page will reload, showing all posts tagged with the “featured” tag, ordered oldest from newest…

The “Resources” entry contains a list of topics. Clicking one of these topics will take you to a page which outlines the various articles I’ve written on that subject..

The “Subscribe” title will take you to a page which will explain all the different ways in which you can subscribe to Restless Pilgrim content…

The “Contact” link loads a page containing a form which will allow you to send me an email…

Finally, the “About” entry loads a page which will tell you a little bit about me…

Let me know what you think, but hopefully all this will make my website easier to use, especially for those new to the blog wishing to browse earlier articles.

As always, thanks for reading…

God bless,

David.