My old blog post structure looked like that: /year/month/title.md. With a few hundred posts, I needed folders, but splitting by month was overkill. Most months only had one post, leaving me with a sea of near-empty directories that made finding and referencing old content a chore.
I’ve switched to a simpler yearly split (/year/title.md). A flat list per year is far easier to navigate. It works perfectly if you average less than five posts a month, no folder ever grows beyond ~100 items, and it can handle the occasional burst without breaking a sweat.
This change will break some old links. I’m not setting up redirects in some complicated edge cases, since it’s not worth the hassle.
I also did some serious housecleaning. I deleted short, trivial posts and split a few overly long ones. I’ve added two new tags: Pinned for posts worth highlighting, and Flagged for those needing a rewrite or update.
Most cuts were easy. Many old posts were ephemeral “how to set up X on Y” tutorials where both X and Y are now obsolete. I’m sunsetting that entire format. There are exceptions like guides for stable, durable projects like bitcoind. They’re useful for historical comparison in my future posts.
My new rule of thumb is simple: Will this post matter to anyone (and especially myself) three years from now? If the answer is “no”, I won’t write it. If it was already live and failed the test, it’s now gone.
The goal is a leaner, more durable blog, one where everything that remains has a reason to stick around. The changes probably affected about 20% of all posts, and it can cause some temporary issues with webfeed readers.