ArtisticallyChill

One of the newest features in WordPress is the usage of Tags on your blog posts. Well it’s new to me but Tags have been a WordPress feature since version 2.3. I just now had the time to mess around with it, and find a cool plugin which I will get to in a moment. But for those of you who do not know:

A tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file). This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are chosen informally and personally by the item’s creator or by its viewer, depending on the system. On a website in which many users tag many items, this collection of tags becomes a folksonomy. ~ Wikipedia

With Tags, blog posts can be grouped, and then filtered with one simple click of the tag by the reader. Unlike post categories, tags allow the writer to assign a specific tag to a post so that the reader can quickly find the post, or group of posts, under that tag instead of going through all the posts that are under the same category. For example, for all my “It’s New Comics Day!” posts I use a common tag of ‘comics’. In that post, if I am talking about a specific comic title, i.e. last week was Astonishing X-men, then I would put ‘Astonishing X-men’ as another tag so that if the reader wants to see only the posts in which I talk about the Astonishing X-men, all they have to do is click on that tag.

Now, since I OCD a bit when it comes to organizing things, I wanted to utilize this new feature on all my previous blog posts. Unfortunately, that would require me to go through every category and edit each post one at a time. This tedious task would have left me frustrated and wanting to scrap my blog to square one, archiving all non-tagged posts under a link like “Not Web 2.0 Enough”.

Lucky for me, I was able to find a suitable plugin to help me obsessively compulsively tag my posts. It’s called Simple Tags. This WordPress plugin allows me to edit mass tags (more than 50 posts at once). This is not the only feature. There are others but this one is the most important one to me. With Simple Tags, all I have to do is choose the post category, and/or month and year in which the posts were written, and how many I want displayed at one time. Simple Tags pulls up the filtered search, showing the title of the post title on the left hand side with a text field to the right. Then I just enter the tags I want for each post and hit the update button. Repeated tags will autofill just after a few letters and also show a drop select menu if there is more than one tag with the same letters. Also, any new tags are automatically added to your tag list within WordPress.

Another cool feature is that you can show a tag cloud on your blog and customize it through the plugin’s settings. You can decide on what colors to use, the size of the font, and order at which tags appear. I’ve inserted a tag cloud into my sidebar as an example.

Simple Tags is currently compatible up to version 2.5 so if you want to use this plugin, I’d would not upgrade WordPress until a new version of the plugin comes out. The WordPress dashboard keeps reminding me to upgrade to 2.6 but I’m definitely waiting until the next plugin update because I still have a few more posts to re-tag. ;p

~ LoneWolf