Hello mostly-chilly Ridgeline walkers —

Tags! I’ve been slowly adding tags to some Ridgeline entries as a year-end project. You can view all the current tags here.

I’m chopping stuff into groups based on walks and routes. For example we have Nakasendō and Tōkaidō and Kumano Kodō and the Ise-ji, and locales like the Kii Peninsula.

I’ve also been peeling off sub-topics like the Literature of Walking and Photography, Bookmaking and Gear.

One question I’ve found myself asking during this act of tagging: Is this worth it? I mean, do people use tags?

I think, yes, tags can be extremely useful, once you cross a certain Rubicon in word / entry count.

I’ve published some 160,000 words to Ridgeline in the last three years. That’s a couple solid books worth of sentences. I’d like to, eventually, produce Ridgeline The Book ¹ — a kind of best-of of this giant corpus, sliced down lean. In order to do that, I’d have to arrange, organize, and, yes, probably tag (categorize) the entries to begin to understand what it is I’ve written in aggregate. So, the main “value” in this activity for me is simply in once again getting to know this corpus. And while I’m, at it, maybe make it a bit more useful for all of you, as well? (At the very least, pump up the Google juice (gross) a bit.)

While revisiting and tagging, it struck me: I should ask you all how you’d want stuff marked and bundled.

So: What do you think are good ways to slice this body of work?

My current tagging is far from exhaustive, and many are redundant. I’ve also only tagged about ⅓ of the entries. The fact that I use Hugo, a static site generator, makes the act of Tag Consistency a bit onerous. As Matt Mullenweg tweet-replied me, “A CMS. You need a CMS.” ² Yes, Matt, I do, but, also — isn’t it more fun to try and program Sublime Text to draw from a list of Hugo-generated tags and autofill for me? (No, no it’s not 😂.)

So, help me tag things. How should I do this?

In other news, I’ve been on a great many “walks of the mind” while working on my followup book to Kissa by Kissa. I’m writing a kinda-daily members-only newsletter documenting the writing / sequencing / production process in high-ish level detail. We’re making good progress. (And I think I’m going to members-livestream some photo + text sequencing on the blackboard tomorrow (Monday, Jan 17) … maybe?)

I’m also gearing up to launch SPECIAL PROJECTS into its forth year. Wild. Year four. This involves extensive reflection on the body of work the membership program has enabled, as well as a breakdown on how it feels / what I’ve learned in the previous twelve months.

Also, starting to make headway on a Japanese edition of Kissa by Kissa; fits and starts.

As always: Thank you to everyone who has joined SP and bought my books and supported my work.

Anyway — busy busy busy over here, but having fun.

Hope you’re all well.
C

Noted: