I've made a few changes to the way the blog is laid out, streamlined a few things. First off, everything that's not blog-related is now available on my personal home page. So if you're looking for information about me, how to contact me, links to sites I like, that's all over there. I felt that having it in two places was redundant, and meant one source or the other was at risk of getting neglected.

The only blog-related subpages are feeds and tags. The feeds page is the same as before, it just provides links to the RSS, Dreamwidth and Fediverse feeds you can subscribe to. The tags page has an exciting new update.

You may have noticed that my tagging procedure has been a little half-assed. To understand why I was doing it that way, I have to explain a little bit about bearblog's idiosyncratic structure.

On RBIC, The full archive of blog posts appears on the front page. Some people want to use the front page for a little introduction or information about the blog, so an alternate path is provided for the archive. By default it's /blog, but we have the option to set it to whatever path we wish (although /blog still remains active...)

For whatever reason, the only place the tag collection is shown is at the bottom of the /blog page. Which, for a blog with over a hundred posts, doesn't do me much good, particularly because I don't use the /blog page, and the tags aren't displayed on the homepage. But even if they were, no one would know they need to scroll all the way to the bottom to see them.

Previously, the way I organized tags was a cumbersome hack: I made a page called /tags with no content, but I tagged it with every tag used on every post, so every tag would appear on that page. Naturally, this made me not want to use any new tags, because every time I did I'd have to edit that page and manually add the tag to the master list. Without automatic tag collection it turns into a big hassle, so I mostly used tags for a few basic categories, which I admit was not very helpful, so I usually didn't bother.

I set out to solve this problem and make tags actually useful, so I figured out another hack, a bit of barbarian CSS that's ugly as sin but gets the job done.

The tags are in a div with a unique class, .tags. So what I did was tell the CSS to plop the div halfway down the screen,¹ give it an opaque background, and pad out the bottom so you don't see the redundant post list underneath it:

div.tags { 
    position:absolute;
    top:50%;
    background:#000;
    padding-bottom:250px;
} 

For the mobile CSS I had to change the top value to 37% to get it to look right on my phone. It'll probably not look right on your phone unless it has a 9:16 aspect ratio. Sorry bout that.

Anyway, the upshot is that I can now tag entries with whatever I want and know that they'll automatically be collected at the top of the /blog page (which I renamed to /tags) where people might actually see it. I'll probably go through and clean up a few of the tags that I don't remember what they were for, and tweak the div a little to make it more legible. Prepare to be taken to taghalla 🦝