It’s interesting how small things mess you up. I am putting some time into trying to make it easier to find stuff on my blog and recently discovered filters where you can “automatically set categories when text in new posts matches a filter”.

For new posts it seems to work flawlessly. The cool thing is that you can ‘Run Filter’ - which essentially means that it will go off and apply that rule to your archive. It works.

Of course if you have a lot of posts (sorry), it might take some time - but it does seem to get there. So. after a while, when I view the categories I can see the post count increasing. And - when I look at the posts through the lens of Mars Edit I can see all the new posts where the category has been applied.

All good. UNTIL. I noticed that though every thing SEEMED to be working - actually, over on the web site, the categories were not being allocated. Turns out patience is a virtue - because after several days (I kid you not) elapsed, it seemed that everything was also working on the site. All good.

( @manton - is this time delay expected behavior?)

All good until I set up the filter to

find text = ‘youtube.com/watch' and add that post to the category ‘myyoutubes’.

The wait aside, it ran like a dream. Except it didn’t. I realized that posts that definitely contained links back to YouTube were not being picked up. I ran the filter again - and waited. TWICE. Nothing changed.

This morning I discovered why.

Turns out that there is a second URL format that YouTube uses … youtu.be

I am guessing that the youtube syntax varies depending on whether you are on a computer versus iOS or something similar. Anyway, I then set up a second filter that adds the post to the same category - and … it is now working (wait aside)

BTW, the really cool thing is that I also use the plugin ‘Lite YouTube for Micro.blog by @rknightuk - so those links automatically render as embedded videos on my site. 🖇️ Say, like this one - which at time of typing still hasn’t been correctly allocated its category - but I am keeping an eye on it.