This week in Andalusada blogging: 9/22/2012

No blogging happened for me until late on Wednesday night, when (powered by Concerta) I decided to forcibly reset my sleep schedule. There, in the twilight of it, the writing started:

• The first thing I posted was "Very Poor Introductions," linking back to the very first post I ever began on this (back when it was Ixbiliada.) It connected a few dots for me - in particular, I invented Annemarie Sansinger on the spot, because there was no plausible Bonaparte left to write Bonapartism: a Very Poor Introduction any more.
• Next up on the list, after some cleanup (about which more below), was a master page, keeping track of Andalusada's authors.
• The UCNA, the nation that is Moorish civilization as of Andalusada's present day, is a successor state. The third post of the week was the placeholder for what it succeeded: Umayyad Seville. Writing that (especially answering why?) was both satisfying and very, very instructive: I'm gonna have to revisit all of this later.
• And because I'd already introduced the "families" tag earlier, I decided to make "families" a bit more substantive by writing a substantive family to tag it with: the House of Umayya.
• Due to a terrible accident, a truly terrible post from I think May (regarding Ibero-Romance languages or something) was completely erased and lost. I took the opportunity to edit it a fair bit, turning it into something specifically about Moorish (the rest of Iberia be damned; I'm not even sure that Castilian is spoken.)
• And lastly, on Friday night, I finally posted an entirely place-holding page for the House of Sansinger, tying together a fair number of other assorted entries. I'm still editing it as of this posting.

If the writing was all I'd accomplished this week, that would've been enough. It wasn't.
The most important work of this week, I think, was the organizing. From the very beginning of the Andalusada Scrapbook, I'd had a category that bothered me: "character sketch." It was singular where it should have been plural, and it wasn't "character sketches" - it was about people.

On Wednesday night, I deleted it, replacing it with a new and simpler tag: "people." The new tag covers anything related to a person, or persons, as individuals (in aggregates they're nations or ethnicities or religions or whatever.)

There's been some other cleanup too:

• One of my pet peeves is the three biggest tags on the Andalusada Scrapbook: parerga, stubs, and works in progress. There's only so much I can do about the works in progress without actually wasting time on stuff that's often also parerga - but a lot of things that I'd tagged as "parerga" were things that, while they don't directly affect history, were covered by tags that will always be listed in the main list. By unmarking all the posts about alcohol, tobacco and firearms, I was able to significantly lower the amount of parerga.
• A number of rarely-used tags were deleted. As I find reasons to add them back in, I'll do so - but no sooner. On a similar note, I've set a lower limit for myself: no label makes the cloud of labels in the sidebar until and unless it references at least three substantive articles.
• Most of my reforms on the Scrapbook involve a fair amount of archive-diving, but one of the newest ones is going to involve editing here too: I'm changing URLs to make them more searchable. The Miramoline, for instance, was edited to be the Miramoline (which is why that former link is broken.) It's involving some significant edits to the blog itself (systematically going through it to correct broken links, for instance), and it's going to involve the same thing here.

That is all. That is enough.