Thursday, 18 October 2007
Wordpress introduces tags
At long last Wordpress supports tags. It has always had categories, but you have to set these up beforehand and they are only really useful as broad subject headings. They are usually displayed in a side bar on your WordPress blog, and the list becomes far too long and unusable if you treat categories as index terms or very specific, one-off tags. One of the problems I had when converting my Blogger blog plus tags to a WordPress blog with categories was the huge number of categories the conversion generated. I spent about half a day pruning the category list. Now, as well as assigning categories to a posting, WordPress lets you assign tags on the fly. I am not sure how this will affect the Blogger to WordPress conversion programs, so would be interested to hear from anyone who tries it with the new system in place.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I have yet to use the new tags functionality; I am waiting until I have considered the consequences as I am not entirely convinced about their usefulness.
ReplyDeleteDo you think they will be genuinely useful?
I think it depends on how the information (tags) are presented. I haven't yet uploaded the WordPress upgrade to this blog but have started playing around with it on the UKeiG Web 2 support blog (http://ukeig.wordpress.com/). The tags are listed under the main posting so people can click on one of them to see other postings on the topic. There is also now a tag cloud widget that you can put in your sidebar. Personally, I prefer to use a search box but everyone thinks and works in a different way so it will be interesting to get feedback from people on all of these approaches to indexing/tagging/searching blogs.
ReplyDelete