Les
Building a sensical taxonomy for a website can be a pain in teh ass… trust me, I have been trying for about a year to work out my cat/subcats

A good rule of thumb I have found is Dmoz.Org and I am going to start using that as a starting block

Society
....Politics
........Election 2004
........Howard Dean
........Libertarians
........Democrats
....Religion
........Abuses
........Christianity
........Islam
........Judaism
....Philosophy

Science & Technology
....Biology
........Evolution
........Creationism
....etc…
....Computers
........Security
........Windows
........Apple
........Linux
........Programming

Personal
....Rants
....Site News

etc etc etc

Just a start, but DMOZ has put alot of effort into their categories, so its a good place to start

John’s right, it is a pain in the ass. I’ve been meaning to condense my categories into a cat/subcat hierarchy ever since moving from Movable Type to WordPress months ago. However, I’ve got this Tim Berners-Lee induced hang-up about changing my URL scheme without providing transparent re-direction. I haven’t had the time to learn .htaccess regular expressions, so the categories have remained mostly “flat.” *sigh*

Anyhow, one way I’ve addressed this is to apply more than one category to posts. I got into this habit with MT’s old primary/secondary category setup and it’s worked okay. For example, my most recent post went under both “Culture” and “Politics” since it deals with a proposed solution to the “Culture Wars.” Perhaps a similar solution would work for you.

Yes, a pain in the ass ("Some sort of an echo in here ..."). I have a brand-new taxonomy that I am trying to figure out when I’ll be able to apply it.  Rrg.  And as soon as I do, changing currents of posts will render it inadequate.  Rrg.

Have been thinking about this a lot lately and have come to the conclusion I’d rather have keywords than categories.  Something dynamic.

I started using a blogging client (MarsEdit) and I have to remember which categories I have.  I’m damned inconsistent with the way I use categories, anyway.  I’d rather just enter a few keywords and have things sorted out automagically. 

Been meaning to post something about this on the pMachine forums but haven’t thought it through enough yet....

I believe in evolutionary categorization.

Start with broad categories and a catch-all. If one of the bucket overflows, refine. Lather, rinse, repeat. After the system devolves into a complete mess, recategorize from scratch.

Rather than using categories, my preference is to maintain keywords and map them to one or more category systems. Well, that pretty much describes Drupal’s taxonomy system