Saturday, March 03, 2007

Blog post label experiment

This post, I'm labeling "b4b" because when I announced this blog in the Blogging for Beginners (B4B): Links: Participant's Blogs list, I characterized it as an experiment in labeling. While this experiment has surpassed the duration of the B4B workshop by a week or so, I am anxious to flag and share the results.

Just as the blogroll that I assembled had grown too long, so too had the list of labels (I'll work on the blogroll later). In the past few days, I have combined labels and re-affixed the combined labels to blog posts which bore original, spontaneously derived labels. What follow are a few memorable examples of the past few days' work (ABC...). The left-most items are current labels derived from items to the right:
  • AudioPodcastsVideo: Audio/Video
    • This concatenation derives from recent wiki reorganization which reflects the intersection of audio files, blogs, podcasts and videos.
  • BloggingCommentary: Blog/Comment
  • CognitionReflection: Meta-cognition and Reflection
I've decided to use CamelCase, instead of slash marks, and to spell items out rather than acronym-ize them (ExtensiveReading rather than ER, on another blog). I've also decided to use plural forms of countable nouns: tools and wikis, rather than tool and wiki (same pluralization for del.icio.us bookmarks, when I get around to it).

In Camino, the Mac browser that I prefer, revisiting and editing posts and labels was easy because I could click on a label. Then the pencil icon on each post with labels that I wished to edit offered one-click access to the posts and their labels. For example, I could select a label like "GlobalIssue" and immediately revise each post so labelled to "GlobalIssues."

However, in Firefox for Windows, I have been unable to display the editing icon (pencil) on any post, in spite of toggling off and on the settings for easy editing (Blogger: Dashboard: Settings: Basic: Show Quick Editing on your Blog? Yes). Clicking on a label concatenated target posts. Yet I've had to use the Dashboard: Edit Posts view, and repeatedly scroll down through the list of posts to visually search for labels to redefine.

Once I got to the end of the first 25 posts or so displayed, I had to scroll down and then select Older Posts, before continuing to scan for labels to redefine. Scrolling down and then reselecting Older Posts was necessary after every label update.

How did Neil Young put it in his song, "Piece of...?"

I'd better stop now, before this report and reflection turns into a rant.

1 comment:

  1. There are still a few odds and ends at the lower end of the frequency ordinated label list on this blog.

    Depending upon what bubbles up in posts on this blog, more concatenation is likely, for example:

    LearningTheory: andragogy...; &
    PhotoSlideSharing: PhotoSharing

    This experiment is on-going.

    ReplyDelete

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