Undoing the Damage Done: Blogger's Labels vs. Technorati Tags

I've been untangling 6 months worth of stupidness with my blog categories (Blogger insists on calling categories "labels," which in my mind is only outstupided by Salon's insistence on calling comments "letters").

Ever since I switched over to the Blogger beta, I've been trying to figure out the best way to combine the functions of externally-oriented tagging (tagging content so others can find it, primarily through Technorati searches), with internally-oriented tagging (tagging or "labeling" to have discrete categories to organize my posts).

For a while, I tried to do both (the categorization via labels and the tagging through the Greasemonkey Technorati Tagging Script), but having two sets of tags/labels was ugly and inelegant. So I decided to stick strictly to the labels.

Boy, was that a disaster.

What I failed to fully realize is that Blogger creates an aggregator page for each one of your categories/labels. So when I started using labels for single-use, one-off tags ("stupid html jokes" or "hot and ugly"), I was also creating useless aggregator pages with lone entries.

This created a whole bunch of unnecessary pages, which greatly increased the number of pages that need to be updated whenever I posted or edited an entry.

In addition, it basically made the categories useless as categories.

So after an initial cleanup this weekend, I was left with 261 categories... and 218 of them had only one entry. (And of course, editing old entries pushes them back up into the DC Blogs feed, in case any feed watchers wonder why 6-month old entries keep popping up.)

Now, I'm down to about 80 categories -- the number will drop a little more as I do some final cuts, then rise again as I start categorizing old posts and making new ones, but keeping it under 100 should be manageable -- as long as I can apply a little self-discipline.

Yeah, that's another trainwreck in the making.

Tags: tagging, categorization

I Am a Failure

Here are some of my most recent failures:

* The past two Fridays, I've left a perfectly good half-a-burrito (well, burrito-like wrapped food item), specifically saved from lunch for later consumption, in the office fridge... only to later forget and abandon it. (They clean out the fridges on Friday.)

* I dawdled on getting tickets (including lawn seats) to the now-sold-out Steely Dan show at Wolf Trap (I'm hoping I can show up and cadge some extras)

* I didn't participate in any of the Skate DC Weekend events this past weekend

* I ordered a USB cable for my cell phone off of eBay a few weeks back. It was only today that I realized that it was also supposed to come with a car charger, which never arrived.

* I've had Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq by Ahmed S. Hashim, out from the library through 2 renewals (the limit -- it has to go back today), and I wasn't able to finish it in over a month and a half.

* This week was supposed to be the week I started going to the gym again. Fail.