Positive

2009-01-12T11:38:53+00:00

Ryan whipped up the ‘Top Tags’ Thoth plugin for me, to replace ‘Categories’ in my sidebar. Yup, little to the right, little bit down…that’s it. Top Tags. I hastened to taggify many of my articles, so that the Top Tags would be fairly representative. I had a hard time figuring out, at first, which tags I would reuse a lot, but soon I discovered, poring over my archives, that many of my articles were, well, WHINY. Perhaps not so much whiny as KVETCHY. I started tagging these complaints ‘grouse’, and was horrified to discover that ‘grouse’ quickly hit my Top Tags.

I don’t think of Faerye Net as a negative place! I was mortified at the idea that instead of ‘anecdotes, opinions and occasional fiction’, I might be providing complaints, whinges and occasional fiction. I invented the antonymic tag ‘huzzah’, and hastened to apply it. It did not rise into the top tags. I tagged more of the archives. Nothing rose to topple ‘grouse’ off the list. So I resolved to be more positive, to post fewer articles that required the description ‘grouse’ in future.

As of December 28, with this post, I geek over language more often than I complain. Vocabulary is in the top five. My tagging is by no means complete – lots of the archive languish unfolksonomified (and, since the switch to tags also switched us to Textile word-formatting markup, unchecked for formatting blips) and I still think I need to come up with a tag to distinguish posts about writing from posts which contain my writing (like the Grey City chronicles.) But at least I can rest secure knowing that I’ve made Faerye Net a less whingey place. One small step for a kvetch.

P.S. As of this post, ‘huzzah’ ties ‘grouse’ at 30 posts. Ha!

Taggers may learn highly instructive things

2008-08-07T11:45:01+00:00

I love tags. They’re intuitive, individual, flexible and informative. They appeal to the part of my mind that color-codes obsessively and also to the slapdash right-now portion (or portions). So one of the chief advantages to upgrading to a newer blog engine was the tags, the glorious tags.

I haven’t finished tagging the archives yet, but after Ryan wrote the Top Tags plugin, I was surprised to see certain trends emerging. For one, I hadn’t thought I blogged about ‘real life’ all that much. For another, I was disturbed to see ‘grouse’, my chosen tag for negativity and ranting, in the top 5. Am I really that negative? I wondered, and considered how many fewer items could be tagged with ‘huzzah’, grouse’s opposite number.

So I’ve been trying to be more positive. Oh yes, if something is a grouse (like yesterday’s Zyrtec-D rant) I dutifully and truthfully tag it that way. But I’m trying not to write as many, to think of more blog items that celebrate or interest rather than excoriate. Tagging is self-revelatory. C’mon, be honest, you’ve looked at your tag cloud on some site or other. It’s interesting to see in aggregate the choices and distinctions we make in individual places, and to compare them to the aggregate choices of other users and the site as a whole. And the thing about any sort of self-revelation is that sometimes it shows you things you didn’t really want to see. It gives you a chance to change.

So I’ve already managed to push grouse down to number five on the Top Five Tags list…let’s see if I can’t push it off altogether!

Posts tagged with "tag" - Faerye Net

Positive

Taggers may learn highly instructive things