...wherein stuff finally gets labelled...

The more I use New Blogger, the more I think it's not so bad after all. Today I started playing around with the Labels feature, which is their implementation of what everyone else calls "tags". It handles the rel=tag thing, so (hopefully) I don't have to tag posts manually for Technorati anymore. I usually don't bother with that, it's just too much of a hassle. Whether that actually works or not, at least it's nice to finally be able to assign posts to categories. I spent a couple of hours earlier today sorting through old posts and trying to put at least one tag, er, label on each. I'm not quite done with that yet, since I've got about 15 months and 400-some posts to deal with, but I've noticed some interesting trends. Rougly one post in four is tagged "photos", and since I didn't know how to post photos the first few months of this blog, and not every post with photos is tagged "photos", the recent average has got to be a bit higher.

I actually started looking at the label feature because I wanted to do a roundup of my parks posts, which is sort of a niche I've fallen into over time. It's kind of a strange little niche, and it wasn't exactly intentional, but the posts have generally turned out well (so I've thought), and have been popular (by my standards), so I've kept doing it. I was originally just going to do a post with links to all the older park posts, but Labels solve the general case.

A lot of my early posts were tagged "politics", but these have become increasingly rare over time. It's not that I've stopped caring or paying attention. Far from it. Primarily I felt I didn't get into the whole blog thing just to be another screaming head in a partisan echo chamber. I mean, I think I could be pretty damn good at that if I wanted to, but saying "me too" all the time isn't very rewarding, no matter how well you word it. Besides that, I also realized that writing about politics tends to make me agitated and unhappy, far more than simply reading about the subject would do. Some people, talk radio fans for example, seem to get a thrill out of being angry, but I don't. And it doesn't help that political posts tend to reel in the wingnuts. If they had anything interesting to say, that might not be so bad, but most of the time they just drop by to declare that anyone who won't worship Dubya has to be tortured and killed for Jesus, stupid crap like that. So most of the time I just don't bother. Which is not to say that I won't, it's just that I usually don't.

One odd bit is that during all the label tweakage, Blogger kept sending scores of page views my way, close to a hundred of 'em, I think. I've generally stopped paying attention to the whole referrer-page thing that used to be a staple here, but with that many it becomes another story. I still have some formatting and cleanup to do on the list, and there are bound to be duplicates to weed out, but once I've done that there'll be a nice long list of blogs, pseudo-randomly assembled for your enjoyment. Won't that be delightful?