But it is about the tag. Or tags.
Back in the day, you just blogged and put it in a category. Then came the ability to throw a single post into multiple categories. Then… I’m not sure when, maybe with livejournal or similar sites, we started tagging posts with moods. “happy” wasn’t a category, but you’d have posts in many categories tagged as such. Over time, tags became more formalized, and with Web 2.0 and SEO (that’s Search Engine Optimization for the uninitiated) they became more important than categories.
Much like I still often refer to this place as a “weblog” instead of a “blog”, I tend to resist change, mostly because I hate change for changes sake. If it has purpose though… well, after years of ignoring the tagging features of the blog software’s I’ve used, I’ve finally caved in. This site will now be tagged.
To assist me with this, I’ve installed an auto-tagging plugin and this morning I ran it on all the old posts to see how it would do. It did horribly. And now I’m too lazy to spend too much time fixing it. It created over 4,000 tags for my just over 1,400 posts, and some of them are really stupid. I installed a second plugin that recommended I erase about 2,900 of those tags, and I did. However, going forward, I’ll spend the effort to better police the auto-tagging and make corrections as appropriate. In the meantime, enjoy the word cloud on my blog over on the right entitled “Partly Cloudy”. If I enjoy the tags, I’ll get a better plugin for them later.
And in order to spice up this otherwise boring post, enjoy this music video: