I’ve been reading this excellent blog full of tips and info about WordPress. Right now I’m pondering tags and categories.
Since I switched to WordPress for the current version, I’ve been using categories and not tags. For a while I tried to get a hierarchy of categories, but I just couldn’t decide on the right one. And the end result is a very unbalanced list. “Comics” and “Life” have quite a few posts, while “Music” has two. That never felt right to me. On one hand, it was a constant nudge that maybe I could blog a bit more and flesh out these sparse topics, but I never really got around to it. So the nudge became more “annoyance” than “inspiration.”
The other problem was, a lot of my posts fit into more than one category. What was the point, if a post didn’t fit into a clear hierarchy?
Now I’ve gotten (back) on Flickr, and discovered the joy of tags. And I realize that I don’t actually need categories. If readers want to browse through my blogs, tags will work just as well—along with my Google custom search engine, of course, and all the other Web 2.0 doodads I’ve just started tinkering with.