Weblog entry #86 for Steve
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I'm on the verge of removing support for the Topics on the grounds that:
- They are too coarse to provide much value.
- Tagging is here.
- It will encourage me to finish the user-tag support.
- The code will feel cleaner.
The last one is hardly persuasive, I know, but the coarseness is beginning to really irritate me. Other than "Questions" too often articles can easily be fitted into multiple catagories.
I'd welcome arguments in favour of removal, or to keep the status quo...
(On the third hand; maybe its time I just left the site alone for more than a few weeks?)
Comments on this Entry
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Topics here always struck me as analogous to the debian repository's sections. If we had a better, more flexible indexing capability, we shouldn't really need the cruder form. Hopefully debtags can supplant sections for most uses in the future (though of course debian has more reason to pursue legacy support than does d-a.org)
And making the code feel cleaner is actually really important: it encourages further work on the code base, as there is less cruft to stumble across, and a simpler mental model to keep in mind. Often the most productive days of coding can be measured in terms of negative lines of code.
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I certainly agree that removing code can often be a big thing, the reason that I don't count it so strongly in this case is that the only person who I know reads/touchs the code is me.
It is available but I know of nobody using it.
The only issue I have with removing the topics is that this does leave us with a large number of tags which might be unweildy for the newcomer.
Still I think on balance removing topics is a good thing.
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