Slices of life

I'm still only about half-way done with labeling my old posts. I actually didn't do any labeling work in the last few weeks, not even to my new posts. But now that I've switched to a new Blogger template that displays a list of all my labels (on the lower right-hand sidebar) and allows readers to view more than just the last 20 posts with a given label, the pressure is on to get this finished.

Labels are an interesting way to read thematically-related groups of posts. For example, if you want to read all of my posts that deal with my dog Haley, you could click on that label. If you wanted to read all of my posts that deal with the topic of Death you would click on that label. Ditto with Douglas Adams, or Movies, or Music. If you want to see only posts with Photos, there's a label for that. Paintings and Drawings, too. And if you're interested, there's a label for all the posts that feature Pictures of Me.

There's some overlap, of course, since most posts get multiple labels. This post, for example, has five labels: Animal friends, Death, Haley, Photos, and Pictures of me.

Labels are fun. They allow you to (to use Douglas Hofstadter's imagery) slice through blogs at different angles, letting you see the same posts from different points of view. I'm starting to explore other people's blogs using their post labels. For example, I can read all of Ashley's movie reviews by clicking on the movies label on Ink On Paper. As more people make use of this feature I'll be using it to look at their blogs in a new way.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have over 450 posts to finish labeling...