[AE.Meta] Tag, you're it! (NB: Contains tags list.)
Hello subscribers and all the ships at sea! I've got a little housekeeping for the newsletter here, a little bit of what the kids call meta, in this sense meaning that this is a newsletter about the newsletter, as I settle in and figure out how things work.
One of the features that we content creators have sorely missed in this age when email newsletters are emerging to fill the space that was once filled by blogs and Livejournals is the ability to organize our past content archives by topic or add metadata using tags.
Since Buttondown here is a platform run by one enthusiastic individual, I've put in a content request regarding that, but also since it's a platform run by one enthusiastic individual it may be a while before there's any movement in that area.
But in the meantime, I feel like I would be less self-conscious about really exploring this medium in a wide-ranging way if I had a way of encoding the topics, making it easier for me or anyone else to find and read back through my writings on different subjects and making it possible for you the reader, if you are so inclined, to filter the way they are organized in your inbox.
Like, maybe you only care about the politics. Or maybe you don't want the politics but you don't want to miss anything else.
So starting with this newsletter, I'm going to be putting a sort of pseudotag in the subject line. You can see I've tagged this one "AE.Meta" in brackets? I put my initials in front of it to create something unique, so if you wanted to create a rule for your Gmail inbox or whatever that banished emails such as this one to the void as irrelevant to your life and interests, you could base it around a search for "AE.Meta" in the subject line, a combination of characters unlikely to occur in any other email.
I'm going to be flexible about this and create new tags as needed, but off the top of my head you can expect the following tags to see use:
- AE.Meta - For updates about the newsletter.
- AE.Personal - For updates about me, both personal news and introspective essays.
- AE.Gamedev - Newsletters about my game design/development hobby.
- AE.Gaming - Newsletters about playing games.
- AE.Writing - Newsletters about writing.
- AE.Politics - Newsletters about politics.
- AE.News - Newsletters about other news topics
No guarantee that all of those tags will see regular or immediate use, but they're the sorts of things I can see myself writing about. I might put other, more specific tags on posts to get more detail in, but I think there will still always be a "top level" tag that is something about as broad as the above, if it's not one of them.
Since this update contains a list of the (expected) canonical tags I'm using, I went ahead and also put a note in the subject line for that, so that later if I'm not sure where I first described this scheme, I'll know where it is.
Now, if you're reading all of this and your reaction is anywhere between "I'm confused, what is the point of this?" and "Oh my gosh, I don't care about any of this!", then rejoice, oh beloved best blessed blithe spirit, for you don't have to do anything with this information and nothing bad will happen if you retain none of it. If this is not news you can use, it is news you can quite safely lose.