Thursday, December 4, 2008

Yet another edit to the blog..

Tags are cheap. You (at least some of you) know that already. But I discovered only recently that my blog lacks them. After the revelation (being a software guy) I spent some time doing the requirements analysis. What do you need tags for? For one thing, you can quickly search related posts. Now I couldn't imagine another human being searching my blog, but sure enough, it could be useful to me too. Sure I can have a few tags. The next question was whether to add tags from now on or tag my old posts too. Keeping some posts without tags seemed unfair, so I decided to take some time to tag all o' them.

I did not underestimate the task. I have 100+ posts. And I had to go through almost every one of them (in some cases even I had forgotten what was there). But overall it was a refreshing exercise. Then I had to invent stupid names for my tags, which was fun too. And in the end, I know more about my own blog now. For example, I always thought that I wrote too much about what I did over weekends, now I see their number is not that much (which means there is more to come :-). The number of tags that you need, number of posts in each category and so on speak volumes too. What started as a pointless exercise in redundancy (to use the expression from the camel book) ended up being quite fruitful.

The conclusion? Tags are useful, think of using them, if you haven't already.

9 comments:

Pappul said...

You may also want to show your tags to people reading your blog. As of now, I see tags for each post but there is no list of tags (with number of posts for each tag) ... may be worthwhile adding that too ... Cheers ... !!

Mohsin said...

Done. (It's on the RHS below 'Links')..
And thanks for the suggestion..

Charuta said...

One more thing abt putting tags I found out , is that once u start tagging, every blog post has to fall in atleast one category of tags which alrdy exists to keep the list manageable..true it isnt a big deal, coz most of the times,we arent very creative abt diff blog topics..but now this tagging sure reduces the (pseudo) randomness of ur posts...they r gonna conform to one of the tags :P

Mohsin said...

Yes, tagging gives an appearance of order..
But a few blanket (and uninformative) tags like MyOwnRantAKAPersonal (I am thinking of adding DoesNotFitAnywhereElse :), and a willingness to use them instead of curbing the post to fit other tags might help ensure you preserve the (pseudo) randomness..

Unknown said...

ohhk...seems to be good...
i'll try using them...
i mean ya im ofcurz a fresher..:D (agewise..n blogwise:P )

Mohsin said...

yes they are good..
btw blogwise we have almost the same age, my first post came just 1 day before ur first post :p (that still makes me a relatively senior citizen of blogosphere :p)..
of course we won't talk about real ages :)

Unknown said...

hmm..so we'll talk in complex nos then..as far as ages r concerned...

so we'll hav real n imaginary parts..

so i'll say my age is 22+0i

u can say ur age is 30-10i i.e. u r 20 yrs vagaire..?

hows d idea..? :P

Mohsin said...

Counting imaginary years is a nice idea, but that won't solve my problem, as 30-10i != 20..*
I much prefer base shifting, so for e.g. I am 17 in base 16 :)

*it's a complex number with a nonzero imaginary part so there is no way it could be equal to a real number (which can be considered a complex number with imaginary part 0)

Unknown said...

arey i kno 30-10i != 20...

i was just kidding sayin tat u cud use 'imaginary' as a tool to express age...:P

chhodon...it wasnt meant to be implemented..:)