Tags

Today is the six month anniversary of The Stars Hollow Gazette and while it’s not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things we could be doing worse.  We have an impressive array of Twitter followers (Facebook?  Pfui!) and a fair number of visits and page hits (not as grand as some, but better than others) and a panoply of content I’d compare to anyone’s.

Mostly favorably.

Anyway, I’ve personally posted some pieces that didn’t revolt me in retrospect and some which may merit future revisiting just to flaunt in my face how wrong and misguided I’ve been.

I’d like to make that as easy as possible without a kick ass search engine like jotter’s and so, since I haven’t written meta in a while, I’d like to talk to you today about Tags.

It gets Geeky below the fold.

Soapblox, despite it’s many virtues, doesn’t have a useful search function and if you try to use Google you can get inconsistent and confusing results.  You’ll generally have to remember an exact title or quote and author.

As an author who writes on a variety of topics, but also contributes anchor diaries on a regular basis, I find my User Page gets noisy with all the usual suspects, so I’ve taken to using ek Politics as a Tag to identify everything else.

I’m not perfect and I’ve only been able to crank through about the first 2 months of my own output, but you can see the results of the vanity tagging technique in the Daily and Regular Features buttons on the right side of the blog.

Thought that was pretty snappy myself.

Now I hope mishima doesn’t mind my picking on him, but he recently changed the format and title of his morning news digest from Morning Shinbun (it means newspaper, get your filthy minds out of the gutter) to Six In The Morning.

I want to stop at this point and say I have the greatest admiration for mishima.  Both here and at DocuDharma he has displayed daily excellence on a deadline for over 3 years.  Unless you’ve seen the elephant it’s hard to understand the commitment.

But I have a dilemma regarding the tagging that introduces two important concepts.

The first things you want to achieve are Continuity and Universality.  When I dip in this bucket I’m going to see everything there ever was.

On the other hand you also need to have Granularity.  I’m focused on this specific thing and not much interested in anything else.

So really the solution is a new Tag like ‘mishima morning news’ to unite it all (not that I’m suggesting or requiring that mishima go through his back catalog and update, that’s my job).

Should you be tempted to review your own work or make a resolution to perform better in the future I have an important tip- My browser has an auto fill feature that supplies suggestions based on the initial letters.  This includes the Tag box when you’re posting a diary.  It’s very easy to junk up that list so I suggest that you limit yourself to a few initial Tags and then add/edit additional Tags after the diary is posted using the button rather than the diary edit mode which junks up your list.

Told you this was Geeky.

My final point is this-

My activist brother tells me I’m intimidating and has shown me several drafts I’ve thought really interesting.  As proof of his good taste I offer August 6, 2001, I a mere typist.

But the thing is that while not every brain child is a gem, there’s no point in denying them a test drive if they represent your thoughts and feelings.  We could be running much faster than we do and my standards are not that high.  If it bleeds it leads, three sentences is a paragraph, three paragraphs an article.

Tell people what you are going to say.  Say it.  Tell people what you said.

And I’ll not promote it unless I think it’s representative of the best this site has to offer (though this is a low and disreputable place).  I reserve my rights to malicious and random promotion, but more often I’m motivated by topical and interesting.

It’s ok to contribute and crosspost.

I look forward in the new year to encouraging that behavior among some of the more port blogs of my acquaintance because I think activity of content generates viewership, interest, and influence.