Search by Topic - New Addtion to Blog

Earlier this month I received a nice note from Brett:

"Hi Melinda, I have started listening to ABR and am enjoying it a lot.
Found your blog from there and wow - thanks for all you are doing to
support the great game of pool. I live in Canada near Niagara Falls btw.

Is there a way to search you blog by topic - so many posts and eventually I
want to read them all but would like to cherry pick a few that are on my
mind first..."

I ran to my blog and noticed sure enough, I no longer have a list of the topics/labels like I used to have on my blog. 

hmmm...

I then added the labels back to the front of my blog and immediately was reminded why I removed the list: there are too many!  Ahhh, that's right, the long list ran WAY down the page - it just wasn't feasible to add because there are just too many labels and it took up a lot of unnecessary space.

For background information, I choose one or more certain words to assign to each blog post, depending on what I wrote about.  Those words (i.e. topics/labels) are listed at the bottom of each blog, but there is also a list of all the topics/labels that can be displayed on the blog so one can choose the topics you want to read about.  For example, if I write about an interesting situation where some guy wouldn't shake my hand after I beat his azz, I would label the blog "handshake." And then if you wanted to search all the blog posts I wrote about "handshake" you would see all the posts by choosing that word "handshake" from the list.  

I'm not sure so many labels/topics is worthwhile, but I do talk about a lot of different things and kinda like the ability to search blog posts by the different topics/labels.

I then went to the all-knowing Internet and searched for ways to display the topics in a shorter format - maybe drop down menu or simply a link that would go to a separate page that would list all the labels.  I luckily found several options to add coding that could offer a solution.  I tested several options on my blog and then finally decided on a code that will allow for the topics to be chosen via a dropdown menu!

So, on the right of my blog you will now see this:

So, now you can all search by topic from the front page again!

BIG thanks to Brett for sending me the kind email and also asking the question - his inquiry helped spur me to find a solution to add that back to my blog in a more effective way.  Thank you, Brett!