Another post-modern fourhman.com upgrade has been completed. Nearly so. I have added tags to every single weblog entry.
This wasn't even an option in the ancient Movable Type, but my new install is built for it. And every other weblog in the universe uses them, so I figured why hold out. Although I can't say I personally use a tag search often on the weblogs I visit, I can see the use. If you wander in to a website cold, and you see an entry tag for Animal Crossing, you could click to see everything ever posted about Animal Crossing. HOORAY.
Of course, this relies on me being smart about adding tags, because they are entirely manual. In fact, I want to go through my entire database again, because I starting adding new tag categories about halfway through. There's also the potential for "funny" tags, which sites like Kotaku do almost to the exclusion of everything else. Which is annoying and non-useful.
The great philosophical debate is, what do you tag? Because in theory, a visitor should be able to simply type in "xbox" and get a more precise result. However, Movable Type's built-in search is kinda slow... clicking an xbox tag is much easier and quicker. But do you pull every noun out of your entry and generate this monster-sized list of tags for every entry? And what exactly is the distinction between a rant and a rebuttal? (You can browse all the tags right here.)
I also have this issue where I hate having a tag associated with only one entry, even if it is legimately something I only ever talked about once. It's the same reason I never put only one card in a Magic deck.
Now do I have to add the Magic tag to this entry?
Something I've been avoiding because it's a pain: since the great weblog archival upgrade, I have a ton of borked links tucked away inside old weblog entries. It's chiefly a result of the archives switching from month-based to individual-based.
But I have been working on getting the game reviews inside the main weblog. Since those reviews were formatted in an entirely different way, I had to do some tweaking to fit inside the current layout. Although - funny story - I'm not sure I even feel like writing any new formal game reviews, since I do so much game reviewing in the weblog anyway. (Which makes me think I should come up with tags to differentiate between BIG game reviews and quick game reviews/first impressions.)
One complication on that, I have game reviews that predate the weblog. So I'm mulling over how I want to handle that. Do I just tack on a bunch of random 1998-2000 months to incorporate a couple dozen old reviews?
As I was considering that, I recalled that I did have a weblog (of sorts) before the Movable Type install in 2001... and a few of those postings might still be around somewhere. Last night I dug out both of our old PowerMacs (a 6400 on OS8.something and a 7600 on OS9.1) and fired them up for the first time since, oh, about 2002. Of course they turned right on (well, the 7600 has two HDs and I had to reboot twice to get the main drive up) and even better, they both networked to my new iMac effortlessly. I wonder if a Windows 95 and a Windows 98 machine could attach to a Vista machine that easily?
I had forgotten how crisp and snappy the elder Mac menus and clicks were. I really miss that, in this mushy OSX land.
Neither of those machines had much in the way of old fourhman.com content, which surprised me. I also couldn't find anything on my collection of old floppies. Somewhere I know I have a single floppy that holds the very first (pre-weblog) website I ever created. And somewhere else I should have that next generation of html files from when I started doing webloggy type things before the word weblog even existed. I just can't believe I would have thrown that away, given all the other stupid shit I keep around.
There is some of that saved by the venerable archive.org, so I'm going to investigate that... and then I'll look into my CD backups from 5+ years ago.
Guh. This is becoming a weblog about a weblog.
