You know how sometimes you have really great intentions, but time constraints just kind of erode them? That’s how I am with my bookmark tagging/organizing. You see, I use the social bookmarking site BlinkList to keep track of web sites that I’ve found useful or plan to visit again. Now, the good folks at BlinkList offer two bookmarklets: One that gives you a chance to type in a bit of an (optional) description and assign some tags and another that saves the link under the tag of “Quick Blinks” with no prompting or input needed. Now obviously, the latter is quite a bit faster. And everyone time I use it, I say to myself, “Self, need to remember to re-tag that this weekend.” Which, of course, never happens. And they just keep piling up…
Decided I should attend some of these Quick Blinked bookmarks tonight. Now, after an hour, I’m down to 158 bookmarks still tagged as “Quick Blinks.” If I can convince myself to tag 10 a night, I’ll be down to none in just over 2 weeks. Ugh. It almost feels like penance.
Now, the BlinkList search will look beyond tags, so it isn’t the end of the world… I can still find stuff if the text I’m searching for is in the title or description. But I can find stuff way better (and faster) if I bother to tag it properly. And hey, call me a squirrel, but I don’t like seeing Quick Blink as the biggest item in my BlinkList tag cloud.
Resolution: I’ve removed the Quick Blink bookmarklet from my browsers. No more uncategorized bookmarks! By gum, if I want to save a link I can surely find half a minute at that moment to toss on a couple tags too, right?
Now here’s a related yet different tagging issue: Should tag names be singular or plural? For instance, I tag a lot of WordPress plugins. In those cases, there’s a minimum of two tags. So “WordPress” is singular and “plugins” is plural. Should it be plural? Semantically, which makes more sense for a tag on links that are about a plugin for some software package? Earlier today, that tag was “plugin” not “plugins” and I renamed it thinking it made more sense this way. Now I’m second-guessing myself.
In the grand scheme of things this isn’t a huge deal… but it’s the kind of thing that can get in to my head and bug me for days. Well, until the next bright shiny distraction pushes it aside at any rate.
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September 21st, 2006 
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[...] As I’ve been plodding through all of my un-tagged bookmarks (see yesterday’s post) I realized I’ve gained quite a collection of WordPress related links. Mostly for themes or plugins that are useful or might be useful in the future. Upon that realization, I created my first BlinkList Space: WordPress links. Right now it grabs anything tagged with “WordPress”. Oh, and this page from BlinkList helped me figure out what a “Space” is. Took maybe all of 2 minutes to get it rolling. [...]
[...] While plowing through my BlinkList stuff (see my recent Tag Angst post), I found a bookmark for Canvas, an interesting project for WordPress. The goal is to make it easy to modify your blog without having to know PHP/CSS (and apparently WordPress Tags too). While you must use a Canvas “theme”, everything about it easily modified and re-arranged — in most cases via dragging and dropping and setting some properties. Conceptually, perhaps like WordPress widgets on steroids. It’s time you broke the mold. Canvas brings the freedom to express yourself through design without needing to know CSS or PHP. With Canvas and Ink for WordPress, you can easily rearrange, reconfigure, and colorize your entire blog without ever touching a line of code. [...]