Midway through last week, I decided to clean up my del.icio.us account. I’ve been using del.icio.us pretty faithfully for over two years and was somewhat shocked to see that I’d amassed over 1,400 links and upwards of 400 tags.

Since I’ve always shared my links publicly, I’d always over-tag any link I posted. I’d tag something with every single descriptor I could come up with as well as using both the singular and plural versions of words. This is all fine and good, since that helps spread the link out and make it possibly easier to find for someone searching del.icio.us tags, but for me, it was a big mess.

So, I decided to bite the bed-rail and clean that shit up. I’ve started bundling tags, looking for and deleting misspellings and combining plural and singular tag words. I’m also trying to simplify my tagging, using only descriptors that I would actually use in a search and combining definition variations to a single, preferred tag. For example, the tags “crypto, cryptography, secret, secret-code, private, crypt, cipher” can be glommed under just “cryptography“.

It’s a pretty crazy amount of cleaning. After a few days of picking away at this in my spare moments, I’ve managed to slim down to 1,190 links and I’m guessing somewhere around 300 or so tags. I still have a ton of links to clean out—all crap I linked a long time ago that’s either dead or completely irrelevant to what I’m doing now.

A service to validate or report broken links in a del.icio.us would rule right now.

This evening, I made a switch to a new plug-in to handle my Technorati Tags. Since the move to WordPress 2.0, I’d been having problems with my old tag manager, Bunny’s Technorati Tags and Ultimate Tag Warrior came highly recommended, so I decided to give it a try and see. Immediately I noticed that it was in a much bigger league and even though Bunny’s has just recently been fixed with 2.0, I made the call and switched.

So I’m liking this new plug-in and everything looks sunny and joyful, except for the fact that all my tags that were assigned in the past via Bunny’s are no longer around. That sincerely blows, but whatever. There’s a way to rescue them, but as of this moment a bit to A.D.D. to manage it slogging through help files and forums. When I do get it down, I’ll note how I did it here. For now, I just wanted to post something, just to see UTW in action. Sweet.

Update:

Now I am seriously impressed. Within ten minutes of posting this entry, the creator of UTW popped on by and clued me in on how to rescue all my old tags. That is way cool. Thank you Christine D. UTW is a great plug-in and it’s developer made my day!