Personally, I think it’s a great slogan. And I agree: well-written computer code is like a work of art. Good code creates something that runs beautifully and can even look beautiful too.

So yes, code is poetry; however, I find it kind of annoying to discover poetry in code, or more specifically, I find it kind of annoying when I find Daisy Bell lycrics hiding in my WordPress CSS:

.navigation {
	display: block;
	text-align: center;
	margin-top: 10px;
	margin-bottom: 60px;
	}
/* End Various Tags & Classes*/

/* "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I'm half crazy all for the love of you.
	It won't be a stylish marriage, I can't afford a carriage.
	But you'll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two." */

I do feel kind of annoyed, but the lightheartedness of it also almost makes me want to laugh. And that’s probably why it’s there.

But when I saw that the Best of the Web blog directory had listed my RSS feed as being http://www.johnlamansky.com/?feed=rss2, I knew I had to implement more extensive redirection.

I had heard of this “WordPress Feedburner Plugin” before, and decided to give it a try. After a little bit of trouble at first, I got it to work and – lo and behold! – the next day my Feedburner subscriber count had almost – not quite, but almost – doubled.

It just goes to show how important it is to make sure all of your feed traffic is directed to the right place.

I would highly recommend the aforementioned plugin to WordPress bloggers who are using Feedburner; and if you haven’t already, be sure to check out Feedburner’s feed redirection tips.

The reason I made this change was because, in short, I had a lot of categories. Dozens and dozens of them. The list on the sidebar was huge.

The problem was, I wanted to have more. Even if I talked about, say, DMOZ, just once, I wanted to have a category for it so that my post would show up in Technorati searches for that topic.

With the default WordPress system, that just wasn’t feasible.

I had known for quite some time that I wanted to make the change to the more flexible tagging system. So once day I decided to do some plugin searching, and I found the perfect plugin: Category Tagging. From the plugin website:

WordPress has a categorization system that lets users categorize posts. However, using categories is no longer state of the art: In the word wide web, tagging is established — and categorizing is obsolete. Tagging is quite different to categorizing since it is based on keywords.

[...]

[The] Category Tagging Plugin provides the following features:

1. Tag cloud
   It displays all tags (categories) as tag cloud.
2. Related posts
   When visitors find your website via search engines or other websites, they are often there for a reason and want to find out about a particular topic of interest. Presenting a list of related posts to a given post makes life easier for your visitors by showing them other posts you have written on the subject. This increases the chance that a visitor will stick around browsing your blog, and is perfect for existing visitors to find out your past thoughts on a particular subject.

Very cool.

I would highly recommend the Category Tagging plugin, although be forewarned that it’s not easy to set up.

While I was at it, I also fixed that annoying WordPress “bug” that causes categories to be arranged by ID when the categories for a post are listed. All I had to do was install the Simple Category Sort extension (link not working as of this writing; hopefully it’ll soon be fixed), click Enable, and tada! sorted categories… er, I mean tags.

First of all, the “b” button used to be called “strong,” and the “i” button used to be called “em.” In addition, I don’t remember the “del,” the “ins,” the “more,” or the “lookup” buttons being there. But I’m glad those new buttons are there. Cool stuff.

I have to give credit to WordPress. Even though it’s a half-upgraded installation, it still works.