Tags
Navigating the Navigation Bar
Hi,
Recently, I’ve been making some changes to the layout of Hardihood Books, so I thought I should send a quick announcement to explain them. This post will be archived so that you can find it easily in the future (and new readers as well).
The main change I have made is to add tags, which are a way of filtering my posts. I intentionally created dozens of tags in order to give readers plenty of options for breaking down posts by theme and genre. In the future, I will add other tags, and revise the current ones.
All the tags appear in the navigation bar at the top of the homepage (see the figure above). While this makes the navigation bar too wide to fit on a single screen, you can scroll from side to side to see them all.
Tags:
Given the (seemingly) random quality to my content (i.e., I like to vary the theme, topic, genre, etc.). I’ve added tags to make it easier for readers to find content they like (and avoid content they want to skip). This also makes it easier to go back into the archive and find old posts - many of which are evergreen.
I have added close to fifty tags, which means that there are now more than fifty options on the navigation bar at the top of my homepage. You can use the arrows to scroll left and right on the list of options.
The capitalized options (Short Stories, Essays, Announcements, Novellas and Serialized Novellas, etc.) are not tags - these are the categories into which every post of mine is sorted. Most of them are self-explanatory.
The rest of the options (all lowercase) are the tags. If you scroll right on the navigation bar, you’ll see a variety of options - genre, theme, style, etc. I even have a tag devoted to free content - selecting it will bring you to a single page with every free post. The tags are organized alphabetically (the categories are not, but there aren’t many of them and they come at the beginning of all the tags). At the very end of the navigation bar, you can find capitalized options for my Archive (every post on one page in chronological order) and my About page.
The most obvious tags are the genre tags (fiction, nonfiction, flash fiction, thriller, year in review, novella, historical fiction, alternative history, science fiction, fantasy, books and book reviews). These allow readers to filter posts by genre and skip genres they don’t care for.
I also have tags devoted to Christmas and Halloween and Thanksgiving, given that I write a fair amount of content related to each holiday in December and October and November, respectively. The “patriotism” tag is a catch-all that includes much of the content I publish in July each year, as well as some from other times of the year.
Some thematic tags (aliens, adventure, coming-of-age/young people, current events, death, dystopian, family, freedom, health and fitness, honor, individualism, international affairs, science and technology, nature, gratitude, fate/free will, Substack, the problem of ease, war, writing) are relatively straightforward. Some of those tags may only have one post, but I wanted to cover almost every theme I’ve ever written on.
My “tradition” tag refers to anything related to tradition itself, or to traditions - which means that many holiday posts fall under it. “Process” is a bit confusing because it refers to writing process, writing about process, and anything related to the theme of process. “Knowledge and skepticism” is about the limits of human understanding and is related to the “science and technology” theme. “Fatalism and chaos” is also related, although it is less technical.
Some stylistic tags (humor) are self-explanatory, while others (absurdity, iceberg/ambiguous, conversational) are not. “Conversational” stories are almost entirely dialogue. “Iceberg/ambiguous” stories are vague and leave most of the action beneath the surface. “Absurdity” refers to anything loosely postmodern, meta, existential, or just plain weird.
In Summary:
Tags should make it easier for all readers to find their way around Hardihood Books. I hope to continue to improve the navigation experience as time goes on. Please let me know if you have any questions or feedback, including regarding the topics I included in the tags themselves.
Please also keep an eye out for the monthly roundup on Sunday, and the newsletter (for paying subscribers) on Monday.
Cheers,
Ben