Organization

Blogging is rather like writing a book except there is no ending unless you give it one, and some of the blogs I have read regularly eventually have done just that. There also has not seemed to be the same kind of organization. There is a bit more organization in topical blogs, but I write about what is on my mind or what happened to make me think of an issue. That doesn't come out linearly.

Labels, being an organizational tool, weren't high on my list of desirable parts of blogging. I am probably the last blogger to adopt them. Although I do have titles, my titles serve more as teasers than explainers. I was supposed to have a subject too? Well I mostly did but often woven in were several lesser ideas.

When I finally got around to using labels, I saw that for it to be really useful, I would have to go back through the blogs from when I began again in February 2006 and label them all. I put it off as I knew that would be tedious and force me to skim them to figure out the subjects-- assuming there was one somewhere buried in the prose.

Finally I took the time to do the job and found some modicum of organization to the subjects. Now when I put a label at the bottom of a blog such as this one, if the reader is interested in seeing all the blogs I have written in that general area, they can click on a key word and voila. I used general terms to allow a type of subject (like creativity) to be looked through-- rather than specific, trying to avoid one label that fit nowhere else.

I realize you techie types knew all this long ago, but I'm not a techie type. I am more a learn-what-I- need-when-I-need type. Doing labels was not high on that list for a reason that goes back to the title of this blog-- or rather lack of said.

For the writer of a blog, the advantage of labels is to see how frequently we have written on the topics we claim are of most interest to us. In my case, the answer was pretty often. It also showed me where I have written less than I'd like about a particular idea.

Labels, if you haven't yet tried them, give a bit of a chapter quality to the writing. When I finally did mine (I am still tweaking the titles on the list), I was surprised there was more pattern than it had seemed.

If you have ever written a manuscript, you know chapters are critical. Each one is an entity of its own. Most particularly in novels, you try to have a form, a flow to those chapters. Ideally, one leads into another. With blogs, that kind of form is generally missing in all but strictly topical blogs, but through labels, you can find a bit of it.

I like to live a fairly orderly life but have very limited organization. No books in my bookshelves are alphabetical, no spices lined up. Not that I am against organization; but there are two blogs on the subject in my 227 for the current 'Rainy day thoughts,' and this is one of them.

Anyway I figured I better write about this for unorganized types like me, who don't read directions, who work by feel, and who like their books lined up by how they look together over who their authors were-- and besides if I am going to go to the trouble of organizing, I want someone to know it. :)