Blog Label Bloat

When we started The Frog & PenguINN blog over 2 years ago, it was not done with a lot of advance planning. Consequently, as we kept adding posts, Grenville and I would separately assign labels to our individual posts.

One thing we never considered was a “master” labels (post categories) listing beforehand. That would have required advance planning, which we do for other things, but didn’t for the blog.

Big HUGE mistake as we now know as we have a lot of labels (referred to on the F&P blog as What We Blog About) for the same topic — for example, New Jersey, NJ and NJ trip when just NJ would have been shorter and easier. Similarly there were posts with a label of crockpot; others with crock pot.

BIG ? was how could labels be deleted once created?

Easy, peasy as I learned by experimenting, otherwise called playing around. Here’s what to do: at the top of the blog window, select Design, when the next screen displays, select Posts and on the top right side, select Labels. A drop down box shows all the post labels, each has a number to show how many posts use that  label. Click on the label to see only posts with that label.

To delete, add, or change labels, select Edit under each post and then choose a different label from your master labels list. Click Update to save the post, then continue with the next one that has the same label.

Using the NJ example above, I selected all posts with a New Jersey label and changed each to NJ.

When there are NO posts with a specific label, it will not display under Labels. This can take awhile, depending on HOW many labels you want to chance or delete.

This is what worked for our blog created with Blogger. I’m not sure if the procedure would be similar procedure (or easier) with a in WordPress created blog.

If anyone has a better — easier would be good too — solution to Label Bloat, please let me know because this is gonna take awhile.