Mania’s Arcania

This is entirely off-topic for this blog, but I just had to share! I have finally figured out how to add labels to individual posts in Google Reader.

Turns out, there’s a link at the bottom of each item for tags — the actual text will be “Add tag” or “Edit tags”. Click on this and you can add a tag to the post — just like adding a label in GMail! I really should have noticed this before, but it took Googling for help before I found it.

This is incredibly useful for me because I use Google Reader for tracking all the blogs I read, whether they are WoW blogs or professional blogs or blogs about blogging or what have you. I star posts that I want to go back to, but previously I had no way to tell why I had starred the post without reading over it again. Did I want to post a link to the item here? Did the post talk about an addon I wanted to try myself? Did it give me a germ of an idea for one of my other blogs? Was it just something I found personally interesting?

Now when I star a post I can also add a tag. (Technically I can add tags without starring the post, but I still find starring the most intuitive way to remind me to look at it again.) My tags become folder-like entities at the bottom of the navigation pane so I can quickly get a list of individual items with each tag.

This should speed up my posting of community links, if nothing else! The other feature I’d really like is the ability to define a filter so that I can see only items with a star *and* a tag. Then I could simply un-star items when I am done with them and not have to remove the tag.