You may have noticed that I have gone from 2,800 tags to 154… and am still in the midst of pruning. Hopefully there will be less than a hundred once the dust has settled, but it’s a bit of a decluttering war at the moment.

The overabundance of tags was the result of last year’s sudden inspiration to tag everything in the Daily Snippits and Saturday Story Prompts.

And I mean everything.

Good Intentions

I tagged them for the names of everyone mentioned, the universe that they came from, the mood, the subject matter, the thematic elements– all things that could already be found using the Search bar. (Oddly, tags themselves don’t show up in said searches.)

This would be an easy way to find similar content, thought I, huzzah!

Only, yeah… not so much.

I ended up with hundreds of tags that had one post, maybe two, associated with them. Click them and they led right back to where you started from. It was a big massive, useless list and it created a plethora of incoming searches from Google that resulted in 100% bounces.

Technically I had content that matched the keywords, but it wasn’t even close to what the readers were expecting. (Sorry readers!)

So last night I sat down, took out the editing chainsaw, and got to work.

Tags v3.14159265

The new and improved tags list is based on the idea that Search boxes won’t always find the right things. Thus I have the following:

Color tags for Model Horses : Searching for ‘blue’ or ‘dappled’ will get you lists of things that aren’t horses. Using the tags ‘blue’ or ‘dappled’ gets you only those models that fit.

‘Verse tags: These are used by Unquiet Bones posts to indicate which universes the posts or snippits came from. Most of the time it will be obvious, but for some Saturday Story Prompts, you’ll have to guess which of the five it matches.

Pair Tags: Since I post on various topics in Perish Twice, not necessarily focused on one team or another, these are used to find posts on the various dual-boxing pairs. Mostly for fun, not sure if these will stay for long.

Event tags: For things like NaNoWriMo and the Great Blog Noblegarden Egg Hunt.

User Feedback

I’m still looking for ways to make my blog (and its archives) more user friendly, so if you have any suggestions please let me know! 🙂