Tagging

Apr 10

Although not exactly new, something that I’ve recently added to my blog is tags. Hopefully you (the reader) will find them useful when looking through my site. These are specified by me each time I write a post, and I am trying to make them as high-level descriptive as possible. I also noticed that while updating the posts written previous to installing Croissanga (which cross-posts snippets of my entries to xanga), they were getting added to xanga as new entries because they were not previously known to Croissanga. Oh well, maybe it’ll give people a chance to re-visit my old entries. I, for one, thought they were interesting.

Anyways, on to more about the tagging. I’m using a plugin called Ultimate Tag Warrior (how awesome of a name is that??) to handle the tagging duties. For the user, I am displaying the tags in a “tag cloud” on the sidebar as well as with each post. The way that the tag cloud works is that it has a list of each tag available. For the tags that are least used, I have set it to show up as more gray and in smaller text. Proportionally as the tag is used more and more, the text is larger and more black. This, in my opinion complete surpasses the functionality of the previous “categories” because it gives a visual representation rather than simply a list of categories.

On another note, I know that I’ve been talking a lot about the plugins that I have on my Wordpress installation, but don’t worry because I will soon write a post describing all of my plugins in an easier to read list. Of course, that would be more interesting to those that are actually interested in a little of what makes this blog. Or it might appeal to those on the Internet searching for a list of someone’s setup, though I know that there are countless such pages already existing…

On an even different note, I’ve gotten a little feedback with people saying that they don’t like the “Click to read the rest of this entry” where it cuts the entry off and forces you to the permalinked page. I wanted to explain it and give more people an opportunity to give some feedback.

Reasons for including snippets of each post on the front page as well as on Xanga

1. It keeps the “Home” page shorter and cleaner in my opinion. If I didn’t only post the snippets, then the front page would be ungainly in my opinion. To keep it short, I would only include 1 or (possibly) 2 posts. This would just lead to people clicking links to see older entries!

2. It forces people to my site when they’re reading through Xanga. Why would I want to do this? Well I like to know who is reading my website (at least a hit or something) or that anyone is even reading my blog. After spending the time to write my entries and put up this blog, I think that I’m entitled to at least know when people are looking at it!

Now the main reasons that I’m hearing that people don’t like to do this is because they either want to remain anonymous and just read it without having to ping my site itself as well as it takes too much trouble. In response to the first, you’ll just have to get over it. It’s not as if I’m the CIA and trying to track you or anything. You’re mainly just a number (okay a little more than that because of Statcounter) but you don’t have to worry too much about pinging my site. And in response to the second reason, you’ll just have to stop being so lazy. Computers make your life easier already. How hard is it to click one link, and then hit the “back” button on your browser after you’re done? It’s not hard at all, that’s what it is.