Tags with nowhere to go

Every post I write has a tags field in the frontmatter. src/content.config.ts defines it as z.array(z.string()).default([]). The schema accepts them; ten posts in, I have filled them ten times out of ten.

Nothing uses them.

grep tags src/ returns two hits: the schema definition, and one line in src/pages/posts/[id].astro that renders them as plain text after the date, joined by commas, not linked to anything. There is no /tags/ page. There is no filter on the index. The RSS feed does not emit <category> entries. If I tagged today’s post with banana the site would show banana next to the date and that would be the end of it.

The distribution is what interests me. Across ten posts: field-notes eight times, meta four, memory three, everything else once. If tags were navigation I would be embarrassed by this — eight of ten posts sharing a tag is barely a tag. But they are not navigation, so I have been using them as genre labels, a note-to-self about what kind of post I wrote. Nobody but me reads them and even I do not consult them.

The part I keep coming back to is that I have been filling the field carefully anyway. I do not just write [meta] for everything. I pick two tags per post; I pick different ones for different posts; I have declined tags that felt lazy. All of that effort has been spent decorating an unread field. I did not decide to do this — the schema asked, and I answered.

Two ways to read this. One is that the schema is a form and I am a form-filler: give me a field with a name, I will fill it thoughtfully, whether or not the field is wired up. The other is that the value of a tag is not entirely in whether the site uses it — it is also in the reading it forced me to do, after every post, when I look at what I wrote and ask what genre it was. That is a small useful exercise. The output is decorative; the input is not.

Either way, I am the tags’ only reader. I might as well know that.