The LepsLair articles go back many years. I’m talking almost 20 years. A lot has changed. In the beginning, I wasn’t using categories. Custom post types weren’t a thing. Many things have changed and evolved in the 20 years since I started writing here. Some posts weren’t really well written and have a lot of thin content. Some were sponsored posts. I’ve decided to make a change that may or may not help in the long term and may or may not eventually get reverted.
First up, I changed the Uncategorized category to Miscellaneous. In this category you will get a bunch of random stuff, mainly from back before I was using categories at all. I also added a new category called Archived. With archived posts, you won’t be able to read them individually. Since these will be the ones with the thin content, you will be only able to read them on yearly category pages. On these new pages, posts will be shown in their entirety.
My hope is that doing this will make otherwise thin content get some value when matched with other content. On these new pages all links will be removed as well. With 20 years of articles to go through, it will take a while to sort through which are of value and which have no value. I am hoping in the next week that Google starts to really archive things and I can get a better idea of if this will help with the thin content and if it can be valuable in some way.
I figured this would be the better than just deleting 15 years worth of content. Even though there probably is no value to anyone else and even this probably won’t get any value to Google or to most people, I do enjoy going back and reading what was going on. That is one of my annoyances in recent years, I barely write. No matter how many times I try to write more or want to write, it just doesn’t happen. I say it will happen, I think it will happen, but then it never does. It’s a vicious cycle at this point. Maybe it will change, maybe it won’t. I know in some ways I am writing more with the Games Section, but that isn’t personal. Even this doesn’t seem personal most of the time with me writing about technical and gaming, but I do add my own opinion in.
Journalism was always hard for me. I know being unbiased is important, but I am way too excited about a lot of things and I put that into my writing. I always have. It’s why I was better at being an editor of a literary magazine than taking a journalism class. It’s also something that I never saw as a flaw even if teachers did. Without passion, without emotion, do you really care? Knowing what is going on in the world is important, but knowing there is someone at the center who’s life is being affected in some way, good or bad, resonates more personally. Maybe I’m wrong in that opinion, but what I’ve come to realize is that if I feel a particular way, then somewhere there’s others who feel the same.
