Begin rant: One thing that annoys me about the otherwise fabulous WordPress software that runs this blog relates to categories and tags.
Categories, which run along the side of most blogs (look to the right), tell you about general topics a blogger has written about that might be of interest. Sort of somewhere between an index and a table of contents. Click on category name and you get all the posts under that topic. My categories include company names like Google or Sony, activities like photography or gaming as well as products or product features like ipod, cell phones etc. You may have noticed over time a certain bloat in my category list and that relates to tags.
Tags are the classification system used by blog search sites like Technorati. A blog post’s tags are filed with the post allowing searchers to find it more quickly or even subscribe to an RSS feed of all posts containing a certain tag. There are many, many more tags that I want to use than categories. More tags makes posts more easily found. Broad tags are useful, like software, but specific, narrower tags, like Dreamweaver or SteveJobs, are even more useful. Most important of all, to help searchers, you want to think of synonyms they might be thinking of for your categories. Someone looking for a post on cell phones might search for “mobile phone” or “cellular phone,” for example. That’s not a problem for categories because the whole list is right there ensuring that blogger and reader are on the same wavelength.
So my complaint comes from when WordPress alerts, or pings, sites like Technorati whenever I have a new post. WordPress automatically uses the categories I assign to a post as its tags. But I don’t want to have a zillion categories. That would be unwieldy and defeat the purpose of giving readers a simple way to navigate my posts. I do want to have a zillion tags so my posts can be more widely disseminated and more easily searched. Hence the conundrum. Why can’t WordPress let me assign tags as well as categories? How about a box at the bottom of each entry letting me throw in some extra tags that won’t appear on my blog sidebar as categories?
Well, WordPress recently opened a comment page asking for bloggers to post features they’d like to see added to the program. The rest of us rate each suggestion with the thought that those with the best ratings will have the best chance of being implemented. Great idea. I just posted my tags and categories suggestion here. So go give it 5 stars (registration required to vote). Rant over.
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