You may have noticed that for about two weeks or so now, across this blog the word “tag” has been used in place of the word “category.” You might also have noticed the list of the 20 most popular tags (on the sidebar on the homepage) in replacement of the giant category list. And last but not least, another new addition to the site is the cool-looking tag cloud.
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using categories is no longer state of the art: In the word wide web, tagging is established — and categorizing is obsolete.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:
- Tag cloud
It displays all tags (categories) as tag cloud.
- 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. 
