This post is the third in a series on private blogs. The other posts are There’s No Place Like Your Own Private Blog: A Journal for Your Eyes Only, and You are 5 Minutes from your own private blog on WordPress.com.

I wanted to wrap up my series on creating a private blog by examining some of the practical ways in which you can use your blog to keep track of many different aspects of your life. There are three topics that I’m specifically going to address to get you up and running. They are: using categories and tags, customizing your sidebars, and using Pages. These instructions are geared specifically towards WordPress, but many of the same functions can also be accomplished using other blogging platforms. Feel free to take these ideas and run with them! Here goes:

From Chaos to Categories: How to get your notes organized

First, I find it really helpful to set up a few categories, so that I can easily find the posts that I am looking for later. WordPress lets you set up categories and also subcategories, allowing you to further organize your notes. You can add categories from the Write Post screen, just by clicking on Add. Type in the name of your category, and it’ll be added to the category list. You can then easily select one or more categories to apply to your post.

To keep up with homeschooling related posts, for example, you might:

• Set up a category called Homeschooling
• Then set up sub-categories for Diary (where you keep track of what academic activities you do each day), Field Trips, Curriculum Research (where you keep up with resources in which you may be interested), and so on.
• You can do the same for other areas of interest, hobbies, and responsibilities. Work, Household, Finance, Knitting, Sports, Journaling, or whatever topics for which you are likely to be making notes on a regular basis.

If you have a short-term project that you want to be able to find easily, but don’t want to give it a permanent spot in your categories list, you can add a more specific label in the “Tags” field at the bottom of your Write Post screen. For instance, I might make notes about a particular knitting pattern that I’m working through. I could add a tag of “Paisley Long Shawl” in the tags field. “Paisley Long Shawl” won’t show up in the categories list, but I can still find it by searching or by using the Tag Cloud, which is a collection of all your tags that can be displayed in your sidebar. I’ll also categorize this post under Knitting, so that I can also find it by browsing through my knitting entries.

Confused about the difference between tags and categories? I like to think of categories as a table of contents. The category list should consist of broad umm. . . categories into which your posts are grouped. The tags, on the other hand, are like an index. They include more specific terms that you might want to use to find your post later, but that you don’t want to necessarily add to the table of contents. You can add as many tags as you want by typing them in, separating each one with a comma.

You are the boss of your sidebar!

If you don’t have a Tag Cloud, hanging around on the theme you are using, you can easily add it to one of the side areas (called sidebars) of your blog. Your sidebars are fully and easily customizable. Just go to your Dashboard, click on Presentation, and then click on Widgets.

This takes you to an area where you can easily (by dragging and dropping) select whatever information you want to show on your sidebar(s). You can insert links to all your Pages, lists of recent Posts, a Calendar, the list of Categories, a Tag Cloud, links to your post Archives, and much more. Just drag what you want over and drop it where you want it to go. If the widget that you placed can be customized, just click on the little icon on the right side of the widget to set it up. Be sure to click on Save after you have things fixed the way you want them!

The Power of Pages

The regular posts that you make will be saved and displayed on your screen in date order. You can access older posts by clicking on a month in your Archives widget, by searching for a particular phrase, by clicking on a category or tag, and so on. Sometimes, though, you’ll want a permanent, non-date oriented page to make lists or collect information. In this case, you’ll want to write a Page, instead of a Post.

You can set all your pages to display in the sidebar, using the Widgets screen that I just described. That way your pages will be easy to access at all times, right from your main page.

What topics are appropriate for Pages? Well, I have a page for a list of Blog Ideas, so that I don’t lose track of the different posts that I want to write. I also have another one for a Master To-Do List. I add items to that list as I think of them, and I erase the ones that have been completed. This means the list will always be up-to-date and easy to find in my sidebar.

Other good ideas for pages are: Shopping Lists, Important Phone Numbers, Login Info (I try to keep a list of my usernames for the various websites with which I have accounts – otherwise it gets pretty unmanageable, pretty fast!), or really anything at all that needs to be kept up-to-date and in one place.

Now go get busy and have fun with your private blog!

If this page was helpful, Stumble it!