For reasons that I am uncertain about, I created a structure of five categories on this blog. I don’t need those particular ones. I might not need any (well, maybe just two, plus the no-category top level). In particular, some of the current categories are usurped by comparable ones over on nfoCentrale Status such as blog development and Movable Type.
The current category miss-fires do provide an opportunity, however. I want to be able to retire categories while retaining the content in their category archives. For example, if I were to retire the category of blog development, I would like to retain the archive of category pages that existed up to that point, just as I have retained the Blogger-counterpart of the category from the previous existence of Spanner Wingnut. I’d also like to retain use of the category for those posts that were assigned to them, even though the categories would not appear in the brief (or long) category index on more-recent blog pages.
This conflicts with the ability to republish the site. I don’t believe removing a category has any impact on the archive for that category: it and its content will remain (though template changes accomplished by alteration of CSS files and Java scripts may be imposed retroactively). But for pages still under Movable Type management, republishing the site, or republishing a page, will lead to removal of any deleted-category associations.
So the misplaced categories here on Spanner Wingnut are going to be my laboratory for seeing how to retire categories while also preserving them as much as possible.
This situation also applies to changes of format as well. So if I want to preserve pages in the format they were originally posted in, I must desist from those pages being republished for any reason. Although I can avoid mass republishing of everything, I can’t prevent republishing of a page as a side-effect of something (track back, comment, simple updating of the post, etc.). For archive and category pages, any addition or update to one of the archived posts will lead to republishing. Also, I think changes to templates that involve the CSS and JavaScript files pages refer to will be perpetuated to all such pages when viewed from then on. These are the factors that must be juggled.
In some cases, the way to preserve something the way it was is to sequester a version, even if a screen-shot, so that it can be referenced from within the blog without fear that it will be altered by any of the changes that have been made since.
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