Blogging about my blog setup tonight. I don’t plan for this to this become a habit; I’m running the risk of catching myself in a self-referential loop and, at worse, imploding. In general, I’m not a fan of implosion, unless it involves bringing a building down. But for the purposes of documenting what I’m doing in case I forget, and perhaps creating an example someone else can find useful, I thought I’d go ahead and put this up. I’d now like to talk briefly about post tagging with Wordpress and Technorati. For those of you who think this sounds like the most boring thing ever (i.e.: most of you), the rest of this entry is under a cut. Click for more.
In short, blogs using Wordpress are generally divided on a macro level into one or more categories: broad divisions by subject. For instance, this post is in the admin category, because it relates to the administration/technical issues of this blog. For more granularity, many blogging systems also offer tags*. Thus, this post is tagged with “wordpress” to indicate that it discusses the WordPress blogging software, a chiefly admin concern. In other words, as I use them, categories are the type of thing being discussed, and tags indicate the exact item being discussed.
I bring this up because there’s a neat website out there called Technorati. To quote Wikipedia, it’s an “Internet search engine for searching blogs, competing with Google and Yahoo. As of June 2008, Technorati indexes 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media. The name Technorati is a portmanteau, pointing to the technological version of literati, or intellectuals.” For organizational purposes, blog creators tag their posts, so that when someone searches for that tag at Technorati, any blog posting so tagged will come up in the search.
Wordpress, as previously stated, has a built-in tag system that, on its own, has no integration with Technorati. Given the illogic and hassle of maintaining two separate tag sets (one for internal WP use and one for Technorati), however, I’ve been looking for a way to automatically have my posts tagged at Technorati with the tags I use internally on the site. Finally found a way to do this with the Wordpress Tags to Technorati plugin. Very svelte. Once installed and activated, it automatically inserts the markup for Technorati tags into every post, to match the WP tags assigned. Seems to work well so far. Highly recommended.
And that’s…really all I had to say. Promise to be more interesting next time. And really, as boring as this post turned out, it shouldn’t be too hard. Chao.
* Some blogging systems only offer tags, and not categories, which is in my opinion kind of a weird way to go about it. Theoretically, in this case you would use the tags as both categories and more specific descriptors. However, it’s easier to create a badly organized site, at least from the point of view of someone looking for information, when there’s no rigid category structure imposed on the blogger and it’s too easy to create a set of tags that may include entries no more elucidating than kitties are awesome and evil cheese.
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