I've been dodging a Drupal feature called Taxonomy for about 10 months. I awoke in the middle of the night, fixed a pot of coffee and started rereading the section on taxonomy in "Drupal - Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Websites" by David Mercer.

it was easy to turn on the feature but you need a "vocabulary". So I scanned the last three months of posts on LSNet and started making a list. To associate posts with the vocabulary, I went through a few dozen post and choose one or more of the vocabulary terms, adding new terms to the vocabulary "Topics". I initially tried "Free Tagging" but that got messy fast.

The process first brought back memories of studying "Linnaen Taxonomy" - phylum, genera and species - I was never very good at that. It is also the basis for the Dewey Decimal System and Craig's List. Then I realized taxonomics is what you do when you have a mess - that is you sort the mess into piles and then stuff it someplace. Like the pile of sheet music on the third desk in my office, the collection of papers in boxes, the stuff in my garage, barn, attic, boiler house, etc.

The stuff on the website is more pleasant to organize, once the terms are selected for a post, the database takes over and links appear after the teaser for each article. Click on one, and all the articles for which that term was selected appears in chronological order, most recent on top.

Submitters of posts are encouraged to edit their pages and select appropriate terms. You can select multiple terms by holding the control key down and clicking on individual terms. Suggestions on revising and extending the vocabulary are welcome and may be submitted through the "Contact" link on the left.