Tags and Tag Clouds
In The Quest for a Better Category List – Part the First: A Basic CSS/JavaScript Popup Menu Michael commented:
…I keep finding categories too restrictive, and not very user friendly for navigating. I really like the idea of tags instead. There’s some great plugins for Wordpress that will allow you to use tags instead, and even display a tag-cloud of your tags…
Originally I sort’ve scoffed at this, deciding that if I needed to I could easily add more categories. However, with some of my more recent posts, I found it difficult to fit the post in my category system, and almost abandoned the post because of that.
Remembering Michael’s comment, I looked into converting from categories to tags. I quickly found the plugin Ultimate Tag Warrior. This plugin gave me a lot of options for adding and presenting post tags. Once the plugin was installed, it was an easy process to add tags to my existing posts. Ultimate Tag Warrior has a function by which it will refer to external tag services to give suggestions for tags to use. Not always good suggestions, mind.
The plugin also has a function for generating a ‘tag cloud’, an example of which is now visible in my sidebar. I’ve made mine present the more commonly used tags in a bigger font, one could have it so that the colour of the tag is dependent on it’s popularity.
Now when I make a post I just need to add a few descriptive keywords rather than worry about where I’m going to sort it. It’s still easy enough to find info I post, as the tag cloud is ordered, and topics that I cover a lot have bigger text.
All in all, it seems I wont need to have a second part to my ‘quest’.
Nice! I like the tag cloud for navigation… much more visual way to find what you’re looking for.
I think it’s a web2 thing… ease of use. Like you said, having to worry about which category to put something in can become a pain. Tagging makes it a bit more like gmail’s interface, just post and forget!