Each post in Scrollback has three labels. They do different jobs.
Category: the subject
A post has one category. It decides which topic card the post appears under on the home page. Keep the list short. Five to eight categories is plenty. Posts without a category still work, they just don’t appear in the topic browser.
Post type: the format
The post type describes the kind of thing you wrote. A quick note is different from a long guide, even if they cover the same subject. It shows as a coloured badge on cards and on the post itself. The colours are set in astro-paper.config.ts.
Tags: the detail
Tags are free-form. A post can have as many as it needs. They power the tag pages and help search.
Using tags for topics instead
If you would rather build the topic cards from tags, change one line in astro-paper.config.ts:
topics: {
source: "tags",
}With lots of tags the home page gets busy. Use minPosts to hide topics that only have one or two posts.