(I'm giving the lemurs a break this week. This badass library seemed like such a good representation for organizing information that I had to go with it.)

Categories and Keywords and Descriptions, OH MY!

What's the difference between a category and a keyword? My general philosophy is that a category should describe why you might want to use an intro video, while a keyword should describe the actual content of the video. This can break down at times (gaming is both a category and a keyword), but this is a broad guiding principal I decided to use when looking at how templates were organized on the site. I've spent the last week thinking about how to reorganize the IntroCave video templates and have just rolled out some of those changes.

Categories

Until just a little bit ago, the largest category of intro videos on the site was General Interest. I don't know about y'all, but when I start looking for a new intro, I don't usually start with "Maybe I should check General Interest to see if there's anything good in there." To make a long story just a little bit longer, I killed that category completely. It actually got a little bit of traffic, but I think that had more to do with it being linked highly in the navigation dropdown than anything else.

Next up on the chopping block: Business / Technology. There were a lot of good videos in this category, but it was just about split down the middle between professional looking intro templates ("I would totally put my corporate logo in that!") and not-quite-gaming-but-not-quite-business-either tech videos. It was a large enough category that I felt like it wasn't that useful, so I've chopped in half. There's a lot of overlap between Technology and Gaming and some overlap still between Technology and Business, but for now I like having a little gradation between 3-piece-suit and Mountain Dew.

The final bit of cleanup was to lump a bunch of smaller categories into a single Other, with two exceptions. Nature was tiny and also not a great category name, so I've renamed it to Travel / Outdoors to broaden it a bit. Sports is still a tiny category, but one that I think has a lot of potential. I don't currently have any video templates that match them, but there are a couple of categories that I'd like to add in the future based purely on my notion that they're popular YouTube categories: Food / Cooking and Kids / Toys. Travel / Outdoors and Sports get to hang around for the same reason—they're both categories that I have faith in and would like to expand over time.

Here are the new categories:

Keywords & Descriptions

Keywords on the site currently serve a bunch of useful functions. Any time someone searches using the search field in the top nav, the first thing I check is for keyword matches. I suggest a list of popular keywords at the bottom of most pages. When computing "similar" videos (a feature I added a couple of months ago to make browsing easier), the best way I've found to do this is tally up how many keywords the two videos share in common. For well-populated keywords, I can also just flat out show videos that match that keyword on each intro's page. Descriptions (the little blurbs of text that show below some intro videos) are also used in my own search algorithm, and writing out a description is a good first step to identifying good keywords. If you can describe something with normal human sentences, it's pretty easy to go back after the fact, strip out all the useless words, and then keep the adjectives and nouns.

So, in summary, keywords & descriptions are good. Only it turns out that mooooost of the intro videos don't great keyword coverage. Ditto for descriptions. I've been slowly rewriting both of these as I rebuild our template library for the new rendering pipeline, but it's been pretty slow to try to do all that at once. Ultimately it's making both tasks take way longer than I was hoping, so I've decided to focus on finishing up the keywords before turning my attention back to the new render servers.

OH MY

This is a lot more minor, but I also revamped the customization filters and spruced up the duration filters (along with all these revised category and keyword/search pages). The old customization filters were Images Only, Text Only, or Logos and Text. I feel like the main use case for these were: (a)people without a logo, (b) people who just wanted to use their logo, and (c) people who just want to use their logo and a subtitle (businesses often want to put their URL or youtube channel alongside their logo). The Logos and Text category technically had that last group covered, but there was also a lot of other stuff in there that wasn't quite as focused.

Here are the revised filtering options: