Using Tags

I might have a problem with overusing tags¹. Currently, the statistics on this blog say:

96 notes • 178 blog posts • 407 office camera photos • 373 tags

And that seems like a lot of tags!

Is it really a problem though? Hugo generates a list view for every tag which seems silly. Currently, Hugo reports building ~1500 pages. It takes about 20 seconds to build on my laptop. If hundreds of them are single use tags, is it worth it?

                    |  EN  |
 -------------------+------+-
   Pages            | 1511 |
   Paginator pages  |   40 |
   Non-page files   |    2 |
   Static files     | 5494 |

Looking a bit deeper reveals that the tail of the tag usage frequency distribution is quite long. Almost all the tags are used exactly one. The most used tags, however, make sense. These all seem important and worth noting to me.

Most-used tags:
  411  office camera
   73  week notes
   49  reading
   42  string figures
   39  career
   37  A29
   34  meta
   32  B42
   29  garden
   29  writing
   28  braids
   26  math
   22  Playing with Games
   21  Esperanto
   21  photo
   17  advice
   17  teaching
   16  B41
   15  hack
   14  A02

It’s a bit of a historical accident that the office camera tag is so popular. That’s just the way the code works; the script tags entries. If I’d setup the camera differently, there weould be no office camera tag at all. A Claude generated summary and full chart is available here.

Initially, I was tagging things as a means of finding them again. That made sense in the beginning, when I didn’t have full text search setup. It probably still makes sense for posts with little text, such as office camera shots.

Presently, I don’t use tags as a search-and-find mechanism very much. I don’t often think, “I need to find such-and-such”, and then go looking for the relevant tag. The main use case for tags is, at least aspirationally, as content streams. I like that I can filter the whole website down to a few narrow streams, as advertised on the feeds page. On can just look at week notes or blog posts.

The Great Tag Tidy #

I went ahead and dramatically trimmed back the tags. To do so, I vibecoded a tag management script that let me manually merge, delete, and rename tags. It generated a diff patch that I could apply across the board to all files that used a tag.

 -------------------+------+
   Pages            | 1155 |
   Paginator pages  |   40 |
   Non-page files   |    2 |
   Static files     | 5495 |

Total in 18336 ms

It looks like a few hundred files were modified.

[current 2653c09] Applied the tag trimming patch.
 241 files changed, 283 insertions(+), 302 deletions(-)

A quick skim of the tags suggests that I managed to get rid of a lot of single use tags. I’ve only gained a couple seconds of build time which is no big deal. It’s nice to see that the total number of pages built has gone from 1500 to 1100.

I’m in awe of people thousands of posts and only have four tags like “work, life, cigarettes, taxidermy.” ↩︎

Published: Aug 31, 2026 @ 20:36.
Last Modified: Aug 31, 2026 @ 21:59.

Using Tags

The Great Tag Tidy #

Tags

Navigation Menu