We suspected that the server would strain on the first couple of days. There’s nothing like real world testing. For those of you who have been around a few years, you’ll remember the 2.0 launch and the issues we had the first week. Nothing new, but we appreciate your patience.

Now, for the important stuff:

Tagging Names

Every user can freely tag their posts. (1) Please use first and last name when tagging a person. “Tony Snow” is acceptable, “Snow” is not. “John McCain” is acceptable. “McCain” is not.

Tagging States

In tagging posts, if you are writing about a state, please use either the postal abbreviation for the state or spell the full name of the state. For Congressional Districts, please use the standard syntax of XX-##. So, “Minnesota” is fine. “MN” is fine. “Minn.” is not fine. LIkewise “GA-01″ is fine, but “GA-1″ is not.

Why does it matter?

This matters because it will make site indexing a lot easier for you and us. For the person, it’s frustrating for half the site to be searching for Barack Obama while the other half are searching for Obama. With states, it will help organize the state sections a lot better. Likewise, it’ll make searching via Google a lot more efficient.

One more thing . . .

If you are only using one tag, but it is multiple words, please put those words in quotes. If you tag Kneel Before Zod without using “Kneel Before Zod” you will generate tags for Kneel, Before, and Zod separately. That doesn’t help anyone much.

Thanks.

Update

Getting in the master section index

If you want to have your posts included in the master index by section, look up at the sections in gray in the masthead. Just add one of those words to your tags, i.e. put “elections”, “media”, business”, “economy”, etc. in as a tag and your post will show up there.

Markdown

You can do some really cool stuff very easily in your formatting by mastering Markdown. Basically, add emphasis by putting an asterisk around a word and bold by putting two asterisks around a word. You can learn more here.