I’ve been blogging for almost ten years. I started with notes from my university classes and snippets of open source code, and became comfortable enough to share decisions I’m puzzling through and things I’m learning about life. There’s a lot of stuff in my archive, and I want to be able to review things again.

Categories would probably make this easier, but I use categories liberally and sometimes inconsistently. I use them like tags, quick keywords that I add so that people might explore a category and bump into other posts. I probably should split it out so that I assign posts to one category and leave everything else as tags. Someday.

In the meantime, it’s easy enough to maintain a manual topical index of my blog posts, and it’s a good opportunity to review what I’ve been writing as well.

I use Emacs Org Mode to manage a large text file divided into headings. Every month, I copy a list of titles into my topical index. I hacked Org-friendly output into my WordPress theme – you can see April’s blog posts as an example (sachachua.com/blog/2012/04/?org=1). I manually organize the list items under different headings, splitting off new headings when I can see a pattern. Working with two windows viewing the same buffer makes it easy to move information around, and org-refile is handy too. I use a checklist structure so that Org can automatically update the number of posts under each heading (C-u M-x org-update-statistics-cookies). When I’m happy with the structure, I use org-publish-current-file to publish it using the settings I’ve configured. The files are in my public Dropbox folder, so they’re automatically published to the Web. It takes me about 10 minutes to add a month of posts to my index and publish the page.

I like seeing how much I’ve written about different topics, and it encourages me to write and organize more posts. Maybe the index might be handy for other people too!

• Topical index as a webpage
• Org source for my blog index