Product Update: Categories, Comments, and Likes
Assign one category per post and The Bason builds the category listing page for you. Scheduled publishing now requires a category, and readers can leave a like without signing in.
Product Update: Categories, Comments, and Likes
Two problems show up together once a blog has more than a handful of posts. Search engines cannot work out how the site is organized, and readers have no way to follow just the topic they came for. This update addresses both.
Categories
Every post can now be filed under exactly one category. There are eight:
- Product update
- Tutorial
- Use case
- Comparison
- Guide
- Growth
- Engineering
- News
The Bason already had tags, but they do a different job. Tags are free-form SEO keywords you attach per post. A category is a single fixed classification — one per post, drawn from a fixed list. Because the list is fixed, each category gets a listing page whose URL never changes.
Every category gets its own listing page
Category listings live at /{locale}/blog/category/{slug}, split by language, so an English reader only sees English posts.
Why that matters comes down to how search engines find a site in the first place.
Crawlers do not discover posts one at a time in isolation. They follow links through your site and build a picture of how it is structured. A blog that only has post detail pages gives a crawler nowhere to go — it lands on one post and hits a dead end.
Category pages become that path:
- Each category page is an indexable URL in its own right
- Post detail links to its category, and the category links on to sibling posts
- Category pages are included in the sitemap alongside your posts
One rule applies here: categories with no posts are hidden from both the listing nav and the sitemap. Submitting empty pages to a search engine costs more than it gains.
Scheduled publishing requires a category
When you create a schedule, picking a category is mandatory. Every post that schedule produces carries it.
That constraint is deliberate. The whole premise of The Bason is that you set up topics once and posts keep shipping. If those posts all land uncategorized, the category pages stay empty and the internal link structure described above never forms.
Set one category and that category page fills itself on your publishing cadence. Schedule under Tutorial and a tutorial library accumulates. Schedule under Product update and your release notes collect in one place.
The category also feeds generation, not just storage. It is passed to the model when the post is written, which keeps tutorial-shaped content out of your product update listing.
Comments and likes
Posts now have comments and likes below the content. The two have deliberately different entry requirements.
Comments require a Google sign-in. Anonymous comment fields turn into a spam moderation job very quickly. One sign-in step removes most of that cost. Comments can be deleted by their author and by the post owner.
Likes need no sign-in at all. Asking someone to register before they can say "this was useful" means most of them simply leave. Visitors are identified by a server-side hash; the raw IP is never stored.
What about posts you already published
Existing posts can be categorized from the post edit screen — pick a category, save, and the post appears in that listing immediately.
If you have been publishing for a while, this is where the update pays off most. Filing your back catalogue creates a whole set of internal links that did not exist before, all at once.
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