This seems obvious now, but as I first began using Drupal I was incredibly confused by the taxonomy system. I guess it is because the word "taxonomy" brings to mind a labyrinthine system of classification as used in biology or an intricate nomenclature like that of organic chemistry. But it is really simple.

In fact the taxonomy module is a simple way to organize pieces of content in a way that is similar to creating a number of tiny blogs. For instance I just decided that I wanted to create a separate section for developer notes in order to keep these together and away from the home page. I wanted to keep the material on the home page as more general interest to potential clients or casual browsers.

To accomplish this I created a new "vocabulary" within taxonomy. The vocabulary is simply a top level category. You associate the vocabulary with the content type that it is used in. In my case I created the vocabulary "Blog posts and other stories" and associated it with the content types "Blog Posts" and Stories".

Under the vocabulary you can add "terms". Terms are simply sub-categories. You can nest these as deep as you want.

I just wanted to keep things simple so I created several terms under my "Blog post and other stories" vocabulary that included "Developer Notes" and "General Interest". Once these are created you can go back to any content of the type that can be associated with the new vocabulary and assign a term. Also you can associate any new content with one of the terms.

Now all of the blog posts and stories that are associated with the term "Developer Notes" are grouped together on a single page that is automatically generated. I went ahead and created a url alias for this term called notes and then added it to my primary menu. Very simple.