A few words about Labels

A couple of you have asked about the labels that appear on this site so I thought I would provide a little explanation. If you haven’t noticed them they appear at the bottom of each post, depending on the length of the post you may need to scroll down the page to see them. Basically, they are meant as a search tool so a reader can click on a label and all posts that have that label will be shown on one page, newest first. This site (Blogger) is also owned by Google so labels also serve as search terms for doing a Google search. So you could be anywhere on the web and type in one of these labels in the Google search box and theoretically you would find this site in the search results.

Let’s look at the labels, the first one shown is “Fleet Racing” and it has a number 5 next to it. The 5 means that I have labeled 5 different posts on this site “Fleet Racing”, click it and all five will show on one page. Googling that same term ends up with 1.5 million results, the first of mine are on the second page of google results. The next most popular label on my blog is “Sailing Sucks – 4”. This is a better example for doing a google search because there are many less results. Why would an avid sailor say that sailing sucks? I bet most avid sailors, especially racers, can come up with their own answer to that!

The Sailing Sucks thing has been a personal joke with Kim and I. It actually started with hockey. We have season tickets for the Tampa Bay Lightning, the NHL team here in Tampa. A couple of years ago we went to a game that ended up being one of those really disappointing losses. We along with thousands of other people were filing out of the arena and the mood was really somber. It seemed that almost nobody was talking, you could have heard a pin drop even though there were people all around, in every direction. After a while Kim mutters the words “Hockey Sucks” and out comes the bottom lip and a classic pouty face. I reply “Yeah, We hate hockey” and we had a good laugh at it. It was one of those moments that just kind of sticks with you. Now, whenever a game goes poorly one of us is bound to say “Hockey Sucks.’

Needless to say this little joke has carried over to our sailing as well. So after a bad race, blowing a start, getting T-boned, etc the phrase “Sailing Sucks” is usually not far behind, usually followed by a chuckle or two. It seems we have been in a little “slump” this past year on Pig Pen so the words are spoken a little more often than we’d like.

Hopefully, I will soon be able to start a new label like; “Sailing is Awesome” or something similar….