Labels on blog posts

As a former indexer I like information to be organised. As an increasingly forgetful person, I need all the help I can get! So I'm putting this tip (thanks, Sandy) where I might be able to find it again - and in the hope it will help someone else.

As bloggers, we all know how useful labels (aka tags) can be. They are a way of gathering together all the posts on a topic, and of retrieving all those posts at once. The bonus on Blogger is that they appear with the oldest first, so if you've got a project that you've labelled with its name, you can see in the posts how it developed.

Everyone knows where the Search box is?

Which brings me to a little excursion on finding things on Blogger. I don't use labels for people's names unless they aren't mentioned in the post. If a word is IN a post, using the Search box (top left) will find it. If a word isn't in a post, but is a label, going to the list of labels in the sidebar, or in some blogs at the bottom of the page, you can find the relevant post that way.

Back to labels. One danger is using similar words for the same topic - eg, knits, knitting, knitwear, knitted - those will bring up four different sets of posts, rather than all of them at once. So instead of typing in a new label, use the "labels" option in the Post Settings and search for the relevant one .

or start typing and see what is offered -

How many labels should a post have? as many as it needs. Why might you want to find it again? give it that label.

What if you have some redundant labels? Here's Sandy's tip:

You can remove a label by selecting the post on your blog list page (Posts page). Then ticking the box. Then going up to the ‘label’ button which is in the same line as publish, revert to draft, and the dustbin. (This is how you also add new labels to previous posts when you realise they could have done with being labelled!) Scroll through the list to the label you want to remove from the selected post(s). When you select that, it will take the label away and inform you that it has been done.