This blog is my first time for making use of Jekyll, and I'm loving it so far. One thing I was surprised to find though was that apparently there is no straightforward way to list all of the tags I've used for my posts. I'm not talking about the user-facing tag directory here – there are plenty of plugins for that, and it's not difficult to write your own template.

Instead, what I'm truly missing is a quick command to run that would give me an overview of my tag usage. When writing a new post, I struggle with tagging: sometimes I end up with alternate phrasing for semantically equivalent tags, other times I forget about the tags I've been using for a specific theme entirely. Having a condensed list in front of me is a good first solution.

I wrote a quick and dirty command line tool that does exactly that. It loops through all posts, parses the YAML front matter with shyaml, and finally orders and sorts tags with uniq.

An example of the output:

$ bin/alltags.sh
3  msc
2  language
2  hci research methods
2  dev ux
1  ux
1  prototyping
1  lifehacks
1  books