LJ: tags

[cellio]

Tags: so close and yet so far. Sigh.

I really like being able to tag journal entries. This should, in principle, make it much easier to find specific entries in the future -- the "gee, I know I posted about $SUBJECT sometime last year" factor. Yes, I know tags can be used two ways, for retrieval and for entry synopsis; I care deeply about the former and not at all about the latter. If my subject lines, opening paragraphs, and cut-tag text fail to give you an idea reasonably quickly about what the entry is about, I have likely failed as a writer.

Ok, so retrieval is critical. LJ documentation says that you can only retrieve the 100 most recent entries with a given tag, which sounds like a lot but isn't if you've had your journal a while. Worse, it was only some time later, after I'd tagged a bunch of entries, that I discovered that the limit is really 70 (or 75?), not 100. At least in my journal's style. I think this is probably a bug in the style and I did report it a while back; as I recall, it disappeared into the land of "we'll investigate". But that was at least thee months ago, so maybe they really consider it a featue.

This limitation might be fine if you could query tags using boolean expressions. It would let me have fairly general buckets while still being able to find, say, my entries about SCA cooking ("sca" and "food"). Boolean expressions have been requested, but I don't think they're working on it.

So, erratically, I've been refactoring some of my tags that turned out to be too general. While a few of these were in the "what was I thinking?" category, like my "judaism" tag, some are ones I fully expected to stay under 100 when I created them. And they did -- but they went over 75. Or they're in danger of doing so.

There will come a point in the future when the limits on entries will make tags useless. I've had this journal for over four years and wouldn't be surprised if I still have it four years from now, after all. Eventually they're going to have to either boost the limit or implement boolean expressions. (And maybe hierarchical tags.)

So please excuse the taggy clutter in my journal; this is a gradual process. (And I've got a lot of untagged entries, too.) If you notice suboptimal tags on my entries, particularly older ones, feel free to drop me email or a comment about it.

Comments

[magid.livejournal.com]

Um, they do (http://www.livejournal.com/tools/search.bml?journal=cellio).
(Change url as necessary to change journal to be searched, obviously.)

[cellio]

Interesting. It's a third-party tool, so I assume it only searches public entries?

[magid.livejournal.com]

You know, I never really paid attention that it's a third-party tool before; I got there by clicking on an icon from my userinfo page, so assumed it was in LJ. I just tried doing a search, and it told me that I'd set my journal to be non-searchable by outside places, so it couldn't help me. I assume it would only search public posts, then, yes.

Really, it seems that if they can give you a page with recent comments based on how you've logged in, they ought to have a search feature based on that, too (ie, allowing searching of locked or private entries if you're logged in).

I've been too lazy (daunted? completist?) to go back and start tagging thousands of entries.

[cahwyguy.livejournal.com]

That only works if you enable indexing by search engines. I'm talking about an LJ-provided tool that (a) knows you are logged it, so it can search protected entries, and (b) is only available on LJ, not elsewhere.