This is a minor issue for me but it continues to be a splinter in my foot: multiple categories are not tags. There’s a lot that categories and tags have in common. Both are somewhat descriptive of an article, both are used as a means to divide articles in a manner other than date. On a side note, dividing content based on date is, IMHO goofy. Other than serving as a means to store, retrieve and display data it serves the user or reader almost no purpose. I’ve never gone to a blog intending to browse and said to myself, “Hey, I wonder what they wrote about on August 15th of 2005?” No, I browse their archives based on categories or, even better, by tags.
Anyway, back to the issue at hand. Like I said, categories and tags have a lot in common but they are still different and they should not be confused with each other. Categories are not tags and vice versa. What’s the difference?
A wall with slots
Think of a wall. On that wall there are a dozen, or maybe even a couple dozen, slots; like mail slots in a post office, cubes in the wall into which you can put things. Each slot is a category on a blog. One slot is labeled “Celebrities” while another might be labeled “Camping.” You with me so far? Good.
OK, now say I write an article that goes on and on about how I hate celebrities. They’re pompous, arrogant and judging from recent court rulings, above the law. This article would quite obviously be put in the “Celebrities” category.
Now, say that within this article I write about Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and lap dogs. Well, I don’t have any categories for these things and even if I did they would be too specific to warrant a category of their own (unless, of course, it was a common occurrence for me to write about lap dogs, which it is not.) So in addition to me putting this post into the “Celebrities” category I attach some keywords to it, a.k.a. tags. I want to describe to my readers some of the things I talk about in the article. I mention Lindsay Lohan, but the article isn’t about her. I mention Paris Hilton, but the article isn’t about her. I mention lap dogs, but again the article is not about lap dogs. No, the article is generally about celebrities. The next day I may write another article about Celebrities but this time instead of ranting I praise them for their altruism and how so many of them use their power for good instead of evil. Yet this post too would be filed into the “Celebrities” category.
And that’s the big difference, you see? Categories are over arching, preexisting “slots” into which you can “plug” your articles. Tags (or keywords) are not chosen from a preexisting list. They are tacked on to the article after you’ve written it and they simply describe the contents of the article.
Take action based on knowledge
OK, so that’s my rant. Now, if your site has a place that says something like “Tagged” and then lists the categories into which the article was placed, there’s something wrong. Either you need to change the wording and say something like “Filed under” or you need to list the tags that are attached to that article in place of the categories. On this site I have done the latter.
Some of you may be saying, “Hey, I want to use tags on my site instead of, or in addition to, categories. How do I do it?” Well, you’re in luck. Lots of folks like using tags instead of or in addition to categories, myself included. If you’re using WordPress or Textpattern then I can point you to the best options out there. But if you’re using something else then, man, you’re outta luck. Try Google, I hear he knows everything.
For WordPress the plugin you should use (because it’s the best) is Ultimate Tag Warrior. There’s a bit of setup but it’s all pretty easy to manage. For Textpattern you need to use tru_tags. That’s the plugin I’m using on openswitch. Easy to manage and it uses the native ‘keywords’ field in the TXP write page. It can then call a list of tags for a given article, it can display them in a tag cloud like I’ve done on my archives page and it can do some other pretty straight slick stuff to boot.
Now start tagging!
