blog: Fixing Up Japanese Language Tags

Finish it. Publish.

content/blog/2025/fixing-up-japanese-language-tags.md

@@ -1,14 +1,15 @@
 ---
 title: "Fixing Up Japanese Language Tags"
 date: 2025-01-07T13:33:20-08:00
-draft: true
+description: Updating Japanese language tag slugs to make them easier to navigate.
 tags:
   - Meta
   - Hugo
   - japanese
+  - japan
 ---
 
-Two years ago, I took a trip to Japan with Tess. I wrote up my experiences on
+Two years ago, I took a trip to Japan with {{< tess >}}. I wrote up my experiences on
 that trip in various posts, and shared several photos.
 
 Feeling perhaps overly-confident in my ability to read Japanese and my website
@@ -19,9 +20,44 @@ Japanese language tags:
 [東京]({{< ref "/tags/japan-tokyo" >}}),
 [京都]({{< ref "/tags/japan-kyoto" >}}).
 
-This led to some difficult URLs because of how Hugo rendered the Japanese
+This led to some unweildy URLs because of how Hugo rendered the Japanese
 language tags names into ASCII when generating file paths.
 
-It's always bothered me a bit to have paths that look like this, so I went
-through today and updated those tags to have ASCII slugs, and Japanese titles. I
-went a step further
+```html
+<ul>
+    <li><a href="/tags/nature/">Nature</a></li>
+    <li><a href="/tags/temples/">Temples</a></li>
+    <li><a href="/tags/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC/">日本</a></li>
+</ul>
+```
+
+It's not necessary to convert URLs to punycode if your document is UTF8, but
+Hugo does it. Browsers should automatically handle converting to and from
+punycode when sending HTTP requests over the wire. Nevertheless...
+
+I went through my post tags and updated all of the Japanese language tags to
+have English slugs and Japanese titles. Now, these URLs are more friendly for
+typing (and the file paths are easier to navigate in a terminal) while still
+showing up in posts and tag list pages with the Japanese name.
+
+```html
+<ul>
+    <li><a href="/tags/meta/">Meta</a></li>
+    <li><a href="/tags/hugo/">Hugo</a></li>
+    <li><a href="/tags/japanese/">日本語</a></li>
+</ul>
+```
+
+
+## One More Thing
+
+I often tag posts with tags by location. For example, several of my posts from
+my Japan trip in 2023 are tagged with `/tags/japan` and with (e.g.)
+`/tags/tokyo`. For the place tags that are within a large region, like cities
+within countries, I added the larger region to the tag:
+
+* `/tags/tokyo` → `/tags/japan-tokyo`
+* `/tags/kyoto` → `/tags/japan-kyoto`
+
+I only did this for the Japan tags for now. I'll be making more such updates
+going forward.