Took a half hour today to revise some of the category and tag management on this old blog, and moved comments around so that maybe they’re within easier striking distance near the end of posts. I’ve been told by prolific web users and knowledgeable designers that expecting people to scroll back up to the top of a post to comment is unrealistic, and I’m finally putting that lesson to use. (I’ve dabbled with these changes before, but have only now come up with a look and placement that I can live with.)

While writing this, Pandora has given me Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice.” You can go with this or you can go with that, indeed.

Something I won’t be doing: going back and adding tags to the 998 (as of this writing) existing posts here on the site. Some of them were tagged in previous lifetimes on Blogger and WordPress.com, but there’s no time and little benefit to re-tagging those posts, so I’m not doing it.

As it is, I’m pretty sure I only added tags so I could make the kind of tag jokes that John Hodgman makes on his imitation blog-like device — the same sort that are common on Twitter. Totally worth it.

Yesterday, John Hodgman, in all his @hodgman-liness, cunningly broke apart the word meh, practically pantsing it in front of the whole school. Waxy.org has his multi-tweet sermon up for you in not-reverse order. Go there if you want the links to work — I reproduce it here just to show off my coffee ring in there. (Update: And now BoingBoing’s got it too: “John Hodgman explains whats wrong with ‘meh’”)

He calls meh “a rejection of joy” and that’s the killing blow, to my mind. Too much joy gets rejected. I like joy. I like to celebrate things. Let’s.

I’m guilty of using meh, for sure, because this language is the only language I have. We may want to virginize her, but she’s a universal whore in the meantime. So with meh in reach, I’m going to grab it now and again. But with visibility being the treasure of the Internet — where dropping a name can be like dropping coins in its guitar case — every post or comment spent on a meh is time that could be spent promoting a friend’s work or offering actual criticism somewhere else. Meh is so often the whiff of a passionless bore.

But Hodgman put it better in a couple of tweets that didn’t get caught up in the Waxy or BoingBoing posts:

Honestly, the idea that there is a smart, passionate person out there who can’t be bothered is far scarier [...] …than knowing the actual Internet handle of one malcontent jerk who took the time to write “meh.”

Anti-meh to that, @hodgman.