Tag scratch
The very obvious feature in this latest release of Wordpress (v2.3) is the ability to tag posts natively. I consciously refrained from adding tag support to posts earlier because of a couple of reasons:
- The feature itself was via a plugin, and I wasn’t sure how it would get integrated in the future.
- I let a set of categories (or topics) develop first over a period of time.
Seeing my del.ici.ous account grow quickly into a dust of tags in horror reminded me of not having another chaos in the name of classification. Tagging is addictive and tends to grow out of control and very fast in number.
To me, tags compliment and extend a category’s context, not replace it. As an example, every time I wrote about Wordpress, Movabletype or some weblog software, I made a decision to put those posts under the category: software → weblog. A better way to extend those posts, thus categorized, now would be to consider the actual names (like wordpress, movabletype, for example) as tags.
With that in mind, while I am not about to unleash tags en masse on this site just because the feature is now natively in, I might consider for select posts. In addition, whenever tags debut on this website, the plan is to display them only on post pages (or permalink pages). Adding them on main page, to me, is like adding textual noise. A tag cloud, in addition, may appear on archives page in future.
Update: Okay, so they’re now on. Archives section shows how, as well as the individual posts, where tags are used. Template tags the_tags() and wp_tag_cloud() make them all look so easy to implement. However, I am yet to see conditional functions for tagging in Wordpress like is_tag() and single_tag() to better use these new features.
Is is worth going through the trouble of tagging your posts if you are the only one using the tag search feature?
I ask coz I am not letting the bots crawl my tag pages due to duplicate-content problem. Anyway, the SEO Title Tag plugin is now breaking my tag pages. And I hate to lose all my title tags just to enable the ‘other’ tags which no one is going to use.
Sep 25, 07 at 23:22If you’re interested in enabling tags only for yourself and not be visible to bots, you can make tags appear only when you’re logged in—much like the edit link becomes visible in posts when you’re logged-in. (This however requires writing a couple of lines of php code.)
The other option is to rate the tag pages very low in the Google Sitemap Generator plugin. That would solve bot crawl problem.
I wonder if Mark Jacquith’s canonical work (see his post today on Wordpress Planet) also does something to redirect tag pages to category pages.
Sep 25, 07 at 23:40Thanks. I took a leap of faith and replaced the SEO Title Tag with the All in One SEO Plugin. The new plugin retained my title tags. The WordPress tags work just fine now. But I still don’t see much use for tags on my blog. But for Flickr or Del.icio.us, that’s a different matter.
Sep 26, 07 at 19:40