Good Housekeeping

In its latest version, the Blogger platform supports that tagging functionality which all the hip kids are so darn crazy about.

In Blogger's parlance, tags are "labels" -- probably to promote consistency with Google stablemate Gmail -- but being the Web 1.0 sort of fellow I am, I refer to these as "categories" more often than not. With a nod to Shakespeare, though, what's in a name? That which I call a category by any other word would smell... well, like dust, since I've not cleaned my screen lately. Regardless, Blogger now allows tags and, after several evenings combing through the post archives, Infamy or Praise is now fully-tagged.

For now, I've classified things into nine categories -- "Law", "Crime", "Blawg Review", "Current Events", "Technology", "Sports", "Schadenfreude", "Random Thoughts", and "Worthy Causes" -- with a catch-all for those posts (like this one) which defy classification.

It's very much a work-in-progress, of course. There is considerable overlap between some categories -- between "Law" and "Blawg Review", to mention one example, and between "Crime" and "Schadenfreude". Some categories, like "Random Thoughts" and "Worthy Causes", have few posts, because I'm just getting started on those topics. That "Defies Classification" is currently the fifth-most-used label tends to indicate that either this blog is much more eclectic than I thought or I need to be a bit more discerning in my labeling. Perhaps it's a bit of both, but I'll almost certainly refine the current selection of categories over time, consolidating, adding, and removing tags and reclassifying posts as necessary.

You can already see and use these changes in individual posts. The labels assigned to each post are shown as links; clicking on any of these links will gather all of the other posts in that category on a single page. In the next week or two, once I can digest Blogger's new template methodology, I'll update my template so that the category list will appear in the sidebar.

[Update]