This week, the weekly reading was about metadata, or “data about data”. In short, we learned about how to add data to the data we have already made, aka categorize our blog posts. At first this seemed complicated, but I was able to add categories to my blog pretty quickly. Did I actually do it right? I hope so!

Anyway, back to the weekly reflection. When completing the weekly hands-on activity, I was reminded of how I used to tag posts on Tumblr. Yes, I had a Tumbr blog. No, it was not as embarrassing as it could have been. Let’s move on, okay? If you are not familiar with Tumblr, it is a microblogging and social networking website. It is not as relevant today, but I used it when I was in middle and high school. By editing and customizing my blog on Tumblr, I was able to learn the basics of HTML. Looking back, Tumblr was how I started to learn to code! Very cool!

On your Tumblr blog, you are able to customize the theme by editing the HTML code. The categories are called “tags” and you can add tags to each of your blog posts in order to categorize them. Also, blogs would add a “tags” page linked to their home page to let people know how they can find specific types of posts, like art or nature. One example for this is an old YouTube video I found on how to create a “Navigation” page on your Tumblr blog to organize all of your tagged posts. The video uses a One Direction blog as an example, which is slightly embarrassing, but it was one of the only videos I found that related Tumblr tags to Markdown categories.

Another example of the “tagged” page, is an older blog I used to get cute calendars named emmastudies. On the left of the homepage, there are links to separate pages that organize the different blog posts. After clicking on the “printables” link, the owner of this blog has linked all blog posts where she has created original content. If you look at the URL of the blog when clicking on a link in the tag, you can see that the URL shows the tags which were assigned to those blog posts.

An important tag mentioned in the weekly reading was the tag to make sure your blog looks good on mobile phones. This is important because so many people have smart phones and access to the internet nowadays. It might not seem that important for a college English class, but it is extremely important! Personally if a website does not format to my phone correctly, it is frustrating! If there is another website that produces the same content, such as blogs or clothing stores.

Metadata is evident across the internet and is an important factor when creating a website. This allows the creator to organize posts and the reader can navigate the website easier. I hope that this post was clear about the similarities between categories in Markdown and tags in Tumblr!