5. Custom categories — How to organise your information professionally

Today’s letter is about custom categories — the core feature for professional use of Channelkit.

When basic categories are too generic for your needs or when you want to specify certain details about things you save, it’s good to think about customising your categories.

A few examples:

• You collect scientific publications for your students and want to include year of publication to your cards.
• You are compiling a personal wish list and want to see the price tag on each card.
• You keep a pool of outsource specialists and want to keep record of their specialisation, skills and projects they contributed to.

In situations like these it makes sense to create a new category using our category builder:

Creating a custom category in Channelkit

Let’s see it in detail. First you choose a card template: basic, textual or visual. This will determine the way your cards will be displayed:

Card templates

The next step is to specify the fields of your category. All categories will necessarily include a title and description fields, that’s why these fields are not shown in the category builder.

You can add as many other fields as you need. Say if you are creating a category for freelancers you would probably need fields like Portfolio, Linkedin profile, Specialisation and Projects.

Depending on your needs specify the input format of each field:

Data types for a category field

• URL field is where you paste a website link. For example a Linkedin or Instagram profile or e-commerce page. Well, simply anything starting with http://.
• File. If you want to upload a company logo, images or PDF files from your computer — create a file field.
• Tags. You can create several tag fields to remind yourself about the different types of information you need to add. For example tag fields like Specialisation and Projects would work perfectly for a freelancer card.
• Text field is for short plain text notes.

When a new category is created, you can simply add new cards to it. Cards will be now searchable and beautiful:

Search by category and tag in Channelkit

We will be adding more data types to the category builder and improving it’s usability.

This post is a part of brief introduction letters for Channelkit users. The letters are packed with basic tutorials and ideas on how to keep your information and knowledge organised, so I decided to share them on Medium.