Keeping your personal site current and tuned up takes a lot of time. Even for small blogs, anticipating content growth early can be worth it.

Things change – design aesthetics become outdated, information architecture can buckle under large amounts of changing content, and code becomes inferior as new things are supported. For something like a personal site and blog, it can be hard to keep up on these different fronts. Content drives both the design and development of a site, and keeping it under control requires some thought.

At the outset I knew I wanted to publish posts efficently and
independently of other services. Content also needed to be as pure and portable as possible for future use, so I chose Ruhoh, a static blogging platform that uses Markdown. That way I could compile and push the site locally, while backing up / editing posts via Dropbox and Writer. Before designing the site, I did a content audit and planned ahead for projected change in content by designing in a modular way and using a tagging system.

Recently, I extended tagging to casestudies, in addition to blog posts. Both casestudies and blog posts now have their own set of tags for organization and findability. Planning ahead really has paid dividends – the site has a flexible information architecture for a single content creator with evolving interests. Maybe they'll be an opportunity to do some visualizations based off of categories / scraped content down the road.

Yes, all the setup takes time, but content is valuable and should be
treated that way.

Thoughts or strategies? Let me know @Aetherpoint