I Let Myself Type the Category Instead of Picking It

I built this site so I could publish without asking anybody for permission. That part worked.

Then I went looking for something I wrote in July and could not find it.

Not because it was deleted. Because I had filed it under a name I would never think to look under again.

Here is the mistake, and it is so small you will want to skip past it. When I set up the article system, the category was a text box. I typed whatever fit the piece that day. No list. No dropdown. An empty field and a man in a hurry.

That is the whole bug. A text box.

Nobody makes a bad decision here. That is what makes it dangerous. Every category I ever typed made sense on the day I typed it. One piece was about motivation and discipline, so I typed Motivation and Discipline. One was about motivation and resilience, so I typed Motivation and Resilience. One was about motivation and self-forgiveness. You can see where this goes.

I counted it this week.

Sixty-seven is not the problem. What sixty-seven is made of is the problem.

Eight labels for motivation. Seven for history. Four for January 6, which is the single most important subject on this entire site.

Think about what that does to a reader.

Somebody lands on a January 6 piece, likes it, and clicks the category to read more. They get a quarter of what I have written. They do not know that. They are not going to go hunting for the other three labels. They read a few articles instead of all of them and they leave thinking that is all there is.

I did not lose those articles. I hid them from the people who came looking for them.

That is the real cost, and it is not a design cost. It is an audience cost. Every extra label splits your own work into a smaller pile and then hands the reader the smaller pile.

Here is the rule I should have written on day one.

Any field that groups things gets a closed list. Not a suggestion. Not an autocomplete that also lets you type something new, because autocomplete plus a free field is just a free field with extra steps. A list, and nothing but the list.

If a new category is genuinely needed, adding one should be a decision you make on purpose, on a different day, in a different screen, when you are not in the middle of publishing something. Anything you can do in the flow of the work, you will do in the flow of the work.

This is the same disease as the contact form on a client site. Let a customer type their state instead of picking it and you will collect TX, Tx, tx, Texas, texas, and Republic of Texas. Then you will burn a Saturday cleaning it up so you can answer a question as simple as how many customers you have in Texas.

Same disease. Different table.

I am fixing mine. It is going to take a while, because merging sixty-seven names down to a real list means touching a lot of published pages and I am not willing to break links to do it.

Which is the other lesson. This costs nothing to prevent and real money to fix. The dropdown is twenty minutes on the day you build it. The cleanup is weeks once hundreds of articles are already filed under names that no longer make sense together.

If you are standing anything up right now that has a category, a tag, a status, a stage, a source, or a type, go look at whether it is a list or a text box.

If it is a text box, you already have my problem.

You just do not have enough rows yet to see it.

Build the list first.