Major Renovations - Making an Organized, Accessible Blog

    "If you want to play organized sports, you have to be organized!" - every minor sports coach ever

    This common friendly reminder and/or admonition which everyone has heard at least once is surprisingly true about many things in life (substitute almost any other verb, adjective and noun for "play", "organized" and "sports" and it still works ), but it turns out to be especially true for this blog, if only because we all love to call our beloved game a sport 

Chessboxing, anyone?

    But the major reason I brought this whole organization thing up is far simpler: I realized that this blog, while offering good content, is terribly disorganized. I end up hopping from series to series of articles, which means that individual series often have a month or more between posts. Making it worse is that there's no real labeling system for posts, making it harder to find individual posts in a series.

This picture's low resolution also presents a serious obstacle to finding anything 

    So what does this all mean exactly? Well, it means that some major changes which were long overdue will be made around here. Here's my plan to tidy up this blog so I can present you with a much smoother experience.

• Creating a Blog Directory. The link to this will go at the top of my sidebar in large print, and it will contain a complete list of categories, series and standalone blog posts which I am currently writing or have already posted, with short introductions as to what each group of posts is all about.
• Cleaning up my sidebar. Again, I'm not sure exactly how this will be organized, but one simple possibility is to have series at the top in alphabetical order and then standalone posts at the bottom organized by theme.
• "Retrofitting" the titles of old posts to make them easier to find. This would involve things like tacking numbers on my annotated games series and my "brutal honesty" series as well as creating titles for series of posts.
• Finishing up my present series one at a time. This allows me to start again in a more organized way without any series running.
• Committing to having only one series running at any time. This is almost self-explanatory, but I'll say it again: it's just a better way to organize my blog and make it easier to get to the page you want when you want to.

   And after that? To be honest, I'm not quite sure. I know that I plan to finish up my "brutal honesty" series in the near future, and that I plan to start an ongoing series on everything to do with openings which I'll release in several "chunks" of 3-6 posts and a series which showcases noteworthy games played by others on the site. I'll continue to post my own annotated games on here under an ongoing series which I do whenever I don't have a series on. As for my analysis posts, they might give way to a sort of training journal in the future, simply because analysis isn't to everyone's taste and it can be tedious to spend an entire post analyzing one position.

    Thanks for tuning in, and I look forward to presenting you with a much more coherent blog next time.