rss readers and categories

Anyone out there who is reading my blog through an aggregator like bloglines will have spotted something irritating about this switch-over to blogger beta... as I go through my archives adding categories to my posts, I'm having to re-publish each entry. The consequence of this is that bloglines tells me that I've posted 107 new entries in the last couple of days. I was planning on just adding labels bit by bit over the next few weeks and months, as I've a lot of posts to deal with, but I've just realised that I should probably steel myself to do them all in the next week or so, as otherwise I'm going to fuck up everyone's rss feeders for eternity. How irritating. So I'm sorry if you're unable to read Assistant Blog through bloglines for a few weeks.

Still on the subject of categories, I'm trying to work out how much detail to go into - I run the risk of producing a massively long list of arcane categories which no-one will ever use. Since Dan pointed this out yesterday I've been trying to rationalise, so for example all posts which I initially gave the labels 'islam', 'iraq', 'lebanon', 'iran' etc have now been grouped together as Islam and the Middle East - which is an irritating catch-all term (especially when Iran is arguably not in the Middle East at all) but works better I think. I'll probably go on to do something similar with the other categories, and flag the more interesting ones higher up on the page.

Some of the categories are interesting, mind - I quite like the ones labelled observations and dialogue, and the ones down as friends and drinking are generally quite good fun, if perhaps of more interest to mates than casual readers. Well, if you do take a look around please bear in mind that I've only categorised about a tenth (oh god) of my archives so far.