Sorry for the silent running recently. I've been working on a few blog-related projects which have been taking up a good chunk of my time.
The first is my raging jealousy of other people's ability to add categories to their blog posts. It's a regular feature in other blog software, but is not an option in Blogger. For most people, this might not be a problem, but as for myself and some others, it's a feature we would like. In most cases where bloggers using Blogger add categories to their blog posts, they've used Technorati tags, which - okay, if it works for them, then by all means use it.
However, I find Technorati slow and slightly unwieldly. Sure, if you want to tag your post so that anyone searching for a particular tag will find it, then it's useful. But it's not all that useful if you want to be able to find all the posts on a particular topic on *your* blog. But how do you accomplish that?
One solution I saw was to use del.icio.us to tag the posts (unfortunately, the blog I saw it on is no more). You can create tags which are unique to your blog, you use them to tag your posts, and then you can post a list of all the tags on your blog. If a reader wants to find all your posts on, say, knitting, they only have to click on that tag and it will take you to the del.icio.us page of that tag, where you will see all the other posts about knitting. Following me so far?
So this is what I've been doing for the past few days. Everything up until the beginning of January has a tag, but I haven't listed the tags I applied to each individual post. I will have to go back and do that, if only so you can see how I've labeled them. I will post a list of the tags. In the meantime, here's the link for the del.icio.us page of my tags.
The second thing I've been working is my book review blog. Wait - hold on! Come back here for a sec! I haven't actually updated anything over there recently! But don't think I'm not feeling considerable guilt about that! And I do intend to rectify that matter over the next few days.
I can't in good conscious start posting reviews of the books I've read so far this year until I finish posting reviews for the books I read last year. What I may end up doing is posting a bunch of short reviews in one post, just to get it over and done with. In the meantime, I've been taking and making notes on what I've finished, so I at least have some idea why I assigned something a 7 when all I remember is that it probably wasn't that good.
I must apologize for being crappy about keeping it updated. It got off to a rocky start, what with all my bouncing the blog around from place to place, so it ended up I spent more time playing around with it than I did writing reviews. My bad. I'll try and do better this year. (Actually, I have a draft of a post about my reading habits last year which I need to finish.)
