October 15, 2020

Pesky blog problem.

Blogger forced me to accept the new Blogger. Last May, I was getting the message "The legacy interface will still be optionally available" and I kept opting for old Blogger, but now that's been taken away. I'm trying to adapt to it, but it has one terrible problem. When I try to add tags, it no longer makes suggestions as I start to type. Not only do I have to type every letter, I have to remember what tags I already have and in what form. Some names are only the last name, others are first and last, and others include a title (like "Justice Kennedy"), and some are all lower case. I have to search my blog to avoid starting a new tag.

With some research, I discovered that Blogger maxes out at 5,000 tags. It won't suggest tags anymore if there are that many to scan! I suppose the idea is no one is likely to come close to 5,000. 

Could I have more than 5,000 tags? Is that the problem! If I knew and if I knew how many more than 5,000 I have, I would delete that number of tags. I'd go back in the archive and find the names that I thought were going to be more important that never got more than one post or two. If I was only 10 tags over 5,000, that would be easy. But maybe I'm 10,000 over. Is that possible? Even then, I would do the work if only I knew that cutting those tags would restore the functionality, but I don't know. 

I'm undertaking the work of going back into the archive, finding unimportant tags and cutting them. I do it in small sessions and keep hoping that I'm getting down closer to 5,000 — even though I realize I may already be below 5,000 and the number of tags might not be the problem at all. 

UPDATE: A reader emailed: "I can tell you that through 2018, you had 7,147 tags. So trying to get under 5,000 is probably not a good plan." I suppose I was edging toward 10,000 tags and facing impossible work trying to get below 5,000. And I was destroying my own tag-work! I have now stopped, preserving all my tags and free to create new tags. What I need to do is remember tags and search the blog to check what the old tags are where I can't remember. This is a little burdensome, but it's far easier than the alternative. 

42 comments:

Laslo Spatula said...

I'm betting "Pesky" ends up in the title of today's podcast.

I also thought "porn" might be there, too, but then realized that might be more trouble than its worth for her podcast distribution sites.

There is also “Apparently They Are Not Kidding” -- the Maddow chryon mentioned in the Fire Chuck Todd post.

So I'm going with "Apparently George Floyd is Pesky" for today's title.

My dark-horse candidate is "Pesky Anarchists Looking For Love".

Maybe I'll try again tomorrow.

I am Laslo.

stlcdr said...

Programmers are idiots who don't eat their own dog food.

Dave Begley said...

Ann:

You are a real work horse; not a show horse. And we appreciate your dedication and brilliance. You're the ACB of blogs!

Licky Lundy said...

I hope among your commenters is someone with the tech knowledge to help solve this.

BarrySanders20 said...

Speaking of deleting tags, I have grown a small skin tag near my armpit that I would like to delete. I named it Tag, and is tag, you're it.

traditionalguy said...

You can delete the tags of commenter names. That once was fun, but the Blog comes first. We appreciate your efforts for so many years keeping on keeping on.

Jim Grey said...

Your extensive tagging, while wonderful, is certainly an uncommon thing among Blogger bloggers. So Google/Blogger is unlikely to come to meet you where you are on tagging. But thinning your tag herd sounds like a dreadful job.

Mike Sylwester said...

I too continued to use the legacy Blogger as long as I could. Now I too must use the new "improved" Blogger.

The selection of tags in the old Blogger was vastly superior.

I perceive that many of the Blogger changes were done merely for the sake of change. That seems to be the only reason why the tags-selection has been changed.

I put a lot of YouTube videos in my Dirty Dancing blog. When I first tried the new Blogger, it would not accept about a fourth of YouTube videos that I tried to embed. Now that problem seems to be fixed.

My biggest dissatisfaction with the new Blogger is the HTML view. In the old Blogger, the HTML view was rather simple, for ordinary people to use. In the new Blogger, the HTML might be great for HTML experts, but it's an inconvenient, complicated mess for ordinary people.

madAsHell said...

How much money do you generate for them??

The tags thing is a freshman data structure in computer science. The M-ary tree.

Assuming that your interface is a web browser, then the only advantage to the 5000 tag limit is the download time during initialization.

Rick.T. said...

traditionalguy said...
You can delete the tags of commenter names. That once was fun, but the Blog comes first. We appreciate your efforts for so many years keeping on keeping on.
-----------------
Hey! For some of us, this is our only shot at immortality! ;-)

PB said...

Pretty arbitrary. Usually these things are in some power of 2.

Mike Sylwester said...

In the old Blogger, the list of previous articles that the blogger sees was grouped into pages of about 20 articles. So, if the blogger wanted to look back to, say, 200 articles ago, he would simply go to page 20.

Now, in the new Blogger, it's all one big scroll, so the blogger has to scroll down 200 articles. Why is this an "improvement"?

Sally327 said...

I wonder if there's a UW college student who might want to earn some extra $$ and could be employed to review the blog in its entirety and put together a working list of the tags you've used.

Jupiter said...

"I hope among your commenters is someone with the tech knowledge to help solve this."

It would be trivial to do, if Blogger gave you access to your tag database. But like most programs, Blogger was designed by people with other priorities than yours.

Dave Begley said...

My title for today's podcast: Ann Althouse: The ACB of blogs and podcasts.

But I don't think Ann will like it or use it.

tim maguire said...

I was thrilled to find out there is a tim maguire tag. Please don't delete it.

brylun said...

I think your content is historically valuable, and it is a risk to trust Blogger and Google will not arbitrarily wipe it out entirely.

Check out http://PoliticalCourtDecisions.blogspot.com to see how Google and Blogger can wipe out an entire blog without prior notice.

Christy said...

I'll volunteer. I am from Tennessee, after all. You tagged me long ago, twice maybe, back when you asked what kind of tattoo we could see you getting and when a prominent blogger didn't get that you were a performance artist.

DanTheMan said...

>>traditionalguy said...
>>You can delete the tags of commenter names. That once was fun, but the Blog comes first. We >>appreciate your efforts for so many years keeping on keeping on.
-----------------
>Hey! For some of us, this is our only shot at immortality! ;-)

If it will help, the tag you have for me, while quite the honor, really can't compete with the others of greater import. I'll volunteer mine as one for the chop.

mikee said...

A printed version of the blog including all the comments would be a nice Christmas gift, for someone who needs to fuel a wood-fired heating system in the far North.

whiskey said...

I wonder if something like this would help. https://www.outsystems.com/blog/posts/web-scraping-tutorial/

PM said...

At some point - legal scholars - will Google and Twitter achieve the level of use and power that one could consider them public utilities?

Peter said...

If you are in edit posts mode you can click on the little tag icon in the top and it will list the labels.
(I also was forced to shift to new blogger a while back…)
Peter Forsythe
PeterForsythe.com

Peter said...

If you are in edit posts mode you can click on the little tag icon in the top and it will list the labels.
(I also was forced to shift to new blogger a while back…)
Peter Forsythe
PeterForsythe.com

Curious George said...

I'm a tag. It was on a post about Clerihews. I wrote a Clerihew that she liked and added. I think I remember it:

Ann Althouse.
Larry's her spouse.
He helps with blogging.
And the sink when clogging.

Maillard Reactionary said...

There's someone who knows the answer, but he's in Bangalore and no one can pronounce his name. Happy deleting, and here's hoping it helps.

Bill Harshaw said...

I've less than 5,000 tags. I too don't like the new system but in my case I find if I type the first 3 or 4 letters of a tag (and I might be typing more slowly than you) it will start to list matching existing tags.

LA_Bob said...

In a reasonable, customer-service-oriented world, Althouse could probably just ask Blogger, "How many tags does my blog have?" I hope I'm not the first person to think of this.

"I'm undertaking the work of going back into the archive, finding unimportant tags and cutting them. I do it in small sessions and keep hoping that I'm getting down closer to 5,000 — even though I realize I may already be below 5,000 and the number of tags might not be the problem at all."

There must be some sociological description for this behavior. It sort of combines the "salami-slicing" approach with some economist's advice that the way to ensure full employment was to have ditch diggers do their work using thimbles and the futility of peering up from the bottom of a 100-foot hole and trying to figure what's going on up top.

CStanley said...

I see that I’ve been tagged twice, both in 2017. I guess I need to up my game to get noticed again!

CWJ said...

Good luck!

Feel free to delete my tag should you wish. I doubt anyone would search for me.

Art in LA said...

It would be nice if Google invested a little bit of time and money to maintain Blogger. It seems like it is 100% automated now, no real new features or support for it, just community forums for help. Unfortunate. I'd be willing to pay them a little bit to keep the lights on ...

tcrosse said...

Go ahead and delete my tag. That will free me to change my name to something pronounceable

Lem Vibe Bandit said...

#FlyingBlind

gadfly said...

In February, 2017, you said you had 6,444 tags and you added a selected tags widget which is no more.

Ann Althouse said...

“ If you are in edit posts mode you can click on the little tag icon in the top and it will list the labels. ”

That won’t work for me in new Blogger. If it did, it would be easy to find the low value tags to cut and also to search for the right tags. It’s a big part of my problem.

Ann Althouse said...

“ In February, 2017, you said you had 6,444 tags and you added a selected tags widget which is no more.”

That is very helpful information. Thanks. That gives me some awareness of the scope of the task.

T J Sawyer said...

In "edit", selecting the Label field, placing the cursor in the field and left-clicking the mouse brings up a list of all my tags. Do you have a Label field present or has it possibly crept off the screen?

Jaq said...


Of my tagged posts, I think this one is my favorite: https://althouse.blogspot.com/2014/12/that-reminds-me-of-joke-about-young-man.html

I didn’t even know that I had been front paged on that joke ’til just now, so I never did tell the whole joke. But sometimes it’s better just to leave stuff to the imagination, the way Althouse did. I heard it in junior high, if you want to imagine it, plus ‘squirrel’ gives away the punch line. The joke also had a broomstick in it, if that helps. That should be enough to reconstruct the joke.

I think my alter ego, Aunty Trump got tagged a couple of times too. That’s kind of why I went back to the original name, because of tags, I didn’t want to. contribute to the problem. Well, the ‘Aunty Trump” tag has already been chopped, looks like. I may bring her back anyway though. Maybe she was never tagged, but that’s not my memory.

Anyway, I’m not offended if you chop my tag(s). I did want to take one last spin in the glory but, as tcross said, it’s kind of liberating. I liked to change handles when I got tired of my voice, maybe I am ready now. It’s amazing what an avatar can do to your writing style. Aunty Trump’s style was kind of based on a lover I had in college who would take a drag on a cigarette before she said something funny, and you could tell that something funny was coming because she would have a little twinkle in her eye, while her face stayed deadpan as she took the drag. Imagining the drag on the cigarette caused me to make the comment more calm, brief, and to the point. You can’t take a drag on a cigarette and then use an exclamation point. Maybe I should take up smoking.

Since Blogger stopped saving the avatar that went with the posted comment, it kind of makes the history weird anyway. Right now all of Aunty Trump’s posts will have my Brando avatar. I used to do this thing that was pretty time consuming of updating my avatar with a different Brando pic from Apololypse Now that I felt best represented the feeling of the comment at the time. I guess that was expensive for blogger to keep the avatar with each comment in terms of storage and retrieval. I would have been kind of p.o.’d if one of my programmers had designed a scheme like that, but it was a nice luxury.

Anyway, chop away, I’m ready.

Marc in Eugene said...

'New' Blogger, given the layout I use, allows me to add a labels gadget to the sidebar, which does in fact, when expanded, list my (vaguely estimated) three hundred tags. Perhaps your blog's labels gadget has fallen away, an unintentional consequence of management? Whether it lists labels beyond ~300, I have no idea.

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David Blaska said...

If it is any consolation, WordPress is doing the same thing. I can still access the legacy "classic" editor but have to copy an existing blog, save it, exit, then go back in through the classic editor. The new format is NOT easier.

jjjulio said...

https://althouse.blogspot.com/2013/07/all-those-tags.html