A Few Site Changes
For those who might be interested.
I’ve made a few minor tweaks to this blog recently. Thought I’d take a moment to point them all out.
Tag Implementation
I’ve begun assigning tags to posts on the site. In WordPress, tags are similar to categories in that they enable a blogger to categorize the content of a post. I never used them before because I thought having categories was enough. But I’ve recently discovered two things:
- Tagging posts helps make them rank better in Google. (Please don’t ask for a link to the article where I read that; I don’t have it.)
- Tagging posts offers additional ways to organize them without having dozens of categories.
Implementing the tag feature isn’t an easy task for me. Sure, it’s easy enough on a go-forward basis. But this blog has over 1,500 posts. To truly implement tags, I need to go back and add tags to all the previous posts. I’ve been doing that, little by little, and hope to be finished by the end of the week.
The main benefit of my tagging efforts to blog readers is that they can more easily find posts that cover topics of interest to them. This is implemented two ways:
- In each post’s header, you’ll find a “Tagged:” heading, followed by a list of tags applied to that post. Each tag is a link; click the link to display a posts with that tag applied. Here’s an example of a post heading:
In the sidebar, you’ll find a tag cloud. This is a really cool feature of WordPress that displays tags in an alphabetical list, with each tag’s font size corresponding to how often it’s used in this blog. Here’s a screen shot of the tag cloud as it exists right now. (Remember, only about 200 posts have been tagged so far.)
Category Name Changes
I’m always tweaking the names of categories, although I haven’t done it for a while. This week, I made three category name changes:
- Recipes has become I Cook, Too. I made this change so I could add a recipes tag.
- Writing has become The Writing Life. This change was completed primarily so I could have a separate writing tag.
- Twitter has become Social Networking. I made this change so the category could cover all posts about all kinds of social networking. Twitter has become a tag.
I’ll probably make a few more category name changes in the coming months for pretty much the same reasons. I just need to come up with catchy category names, which is often a challenge for me.
Interesting Links
Those of you who have been visiting this site regularly for some time may remember my link posts. They were automated through a feature on the del.icio.us Web site. I’d bookmark interesting pages on my Delicious account and the links would be automatically accumulated and posted nightly. I set this up in 2006 and it ran pretty well until recently, when changes to either Delicious or WordPress broke it.
I recently discovered a WordPress plugin called Postalicious. This plugin replicates the functionality of the Delicious feature that broke. The result is the daily (or almost daily) Interesting Links posts you find on the site. They’re all posted to the This Just In… category and are tagged links. You can browse all of my Delicious bookmarks at http://delicious.com/mlanger.
If you’re a Delicious user, I urge you to bookmark the blog posts on this site that you like. Not only does this help spread the word about the content here, but it helps me identify the content that readers enjoy reading most. You’ll find an Add to delicious link at the bottom of each post.
Polls
The Polls feature stopped working. I don’t know why. I’ve removed the poll from the sidebar and may remove the remaining polls if I can’t figure out how to resolve the problem.
New Link Categories
I added a few new link categories and placed them on the right sidebar. One of them is called On Politics and includes links of interest to U.S. voters this election year.
I urge all Americans who are eligible to vote to do so.
Did you enjoy this post? If so, please comment on it or share a little link love:
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