For years, I have been frustrated by the inability to search this blog effectively. The blog has a search bar in it, and I also have a search bar in the blog editor. Neither one works very well. Blogger's search is the worst search tool that I have ever used, and that's saying something. It is extremely ironic that search engine Google owns Blogger.
Last night someone asked why the Applewood Nancy Drew editions are selling at such high prices. I have written about the Applewood editions in several posts. I wanted to find one and link to it. No matter what logical search terms I used (like "Applewood" paired with "Nancy Drew"), I could not locate any of my old posts on the subject via Blogger's search. What an epic fail, Google.
I have too many blog posts to find the posts without spending a large amount of time reading through old posts. I didn't know what the titles were to the old posts about the Applewood books. Besides, I suffered through two power outages last night. Each power outage was approximately 1 1/2 hours long, staggered a few hours apart. It was extremely annoying. In between outages, I typed out a short response about why some people pay so much for the Applewood editions.
Today I mulled over the blog situation and finally decided to do something about it. While Blogger's search bar simply cannot search the blog, the tags work quite well. I used the "Nancy Drew" tag to pull up the nearly 200 posts with that tag. I created new tags as I thought of appropriate ones and changed the tags on many posts from "Nancy Drew" to more specific tags like "Nancy Drew Formats" and "Nancy Drew International Editions."
As I went through the posts, I began to spot my Applewood posts and tagged them as "Nancy Drew Applewood." At least now I can find them.
My new Nancy Drew tags are indicated within boxes in the following image. You will have to click on the image in order to see it more clearly.
My original Nancy Drew tag now has just 64 posts, which is much more manageable.
I found some of my posts today that I hadn't seen in years due to my inability to locate them. I added some posts to the "Nancy Drew 1930A-1 Old Clock" tag that I had missed years ago when I created that tag.
I have labeled this post as "Social Media," and I plan to change the tags on old posts that are about this blog, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter to the "Social Media" tag. I also need to divide the posts under some of the other tags, like Judy Bolton, into multiple tags to make those topics easier to navigate.
I have been annoyed for years that my tags don't display in the mobile version of Blogger. Actually, I thought that there was a way to see them but there isn't. One can change to the web version, but I don't think most people will do that unless they know what they can't see in the mobile version. The blog is impossible to navigate in the mobile version.
I tried to find a way to override the setting so that tags would show in the mobile version. Some sites claim that can be done, but their methods don't work. Finally, I went into the blog settings and disabled the mobile version. I never should have listened when Google/Blogger insisted that blogs needed to change to the mobile version. Sure, let's make the blog impossible to navigate. That's certainly better for everyone.
I regret if this change is causing mobile users any distress. I want the tags to be visible no matter how people come to this blog. I moved the tags higher on up on the page on the right side so that they can be found easily, and they now show in mobile, even though the text is a bit small.
I don't use mobile for websites except occasionally. When I'm not on a desktop computer or laptop, I'm on an iPad. I checked the blog with my phone after I disabled the mobile version. If I turn my phone sideways, I can read the posts. Again, I am sorry if this is an inconvenience, but I haven't spent thousands of hours over the last decade writing all of these posts just so that people who use mobile devices will never know what is here. That is unacceptable to me, and I should not have put up with the tags being missing for so many years.
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