Sam Davyson

At the moment I have tags silently working in the background of the blog to help to get my posts aggregated on Technorati, and similar services. You can view the tag page for any tag that you think I’d have by simply adding ?tag=tagword to the end of the URL. For instance here are all my posts about Firefox. For multiple tags just add a plus sign. So here are all my posts about firefox and ie. But tagging is done manually by me. You can still find posts that I havent tagged up properly using the search function.
I used to have tags more prominently on the site. This is what the old page used to read:

Over organisation. What a concept.

You would have thought with two different classification systems this blog might come close. And I suppose it does come close. So why are there two systems? How do they work?

Firstly the tags are keywords that I label each post with when I write it. I use quite a few per post. And I don’t think twice about making as new tag that I will probably never reuse. I just make them on the fly. So there are loads of them. The main interface for the tags is the cloud shown in the sidebar. Its main use is for me to see at a glance what most of my blog is about. As you can see it does this well. The tags come via an external plugin.
Categories however are more carefully thought out. I don’t normally make new ones. They all represent strands of the content that I produce for this blog. They are listed in a column in the side bar. And they are also listed at the top of each post with the text “Filed Under”. The categories are built into WordPress.

I would say, two systems and still disorganised.

My, you must be bored if you are reading right down to here.