Set Tags and Categories for Blog Entries

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Yet another Web 2.0 concept is the notion of tagging content, both within your blog and out there on the Internet at large. There’s a certain Web 2.0-ish belief that all of this amazing information is at our disposal thanks to the Internet, but it’s difficult to get a handle on it without metadata—or data about data—that can be used to give us a sense of how things fit together. Tags are one way that people have begun to work on offering more information about the information out there on the Web. Tags can be thought of as free-form categories. If you’re working on your own blog and entering a new entry, you might place it in a particular category—say, the “vacation” category—because that’s one of the categories that you’ve set up. But if you had the freedom to assign tags, or keywords, to a blog entry, you might go further than that by tagging your entry as about your “sweetheart” and “Cozumel” and the “beach” and an “engagement.” Something like that. Oh, and you got there from the hotel on a “Vespa.” What tags do, both within individual blogs and on the Internet in a wider context, is simply give us more information about the posts that are being made, offering readers more entry points into information and entertainment on the Web. Tags give you a way to create free-form associations between your own blog entries, and they can also provide hooks into social networking websites such as Technorati.com. And tags are the heart and soul of some multimedia sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr, where the tags help you locate and share related content with the online community of users.

Beyond tagging, other options such as social bookmarking (creating bookmarks to sites that you share with others) and ratings sites (such as Digg.com) can help build interest and traffic for your blog. The more people link to you, the higher you appear in search engines and the more chances you have that others will discover you. In a similar way, the more active (and interesting) you are when it comes to tagging others and sharing bookmarks, the more likely you’re going to get traffic to your blog, too. So, in this article, I’d like to start by discussing the tagging possibilities that may be built in or offered for your blog, as well as discussing some third-party options. From there, we’ll look at external Web 2.0 services that can drive traffic to your site including tagging, social bookmarking, and ranking services. Of the four major blog tools we’ve discussed in this article, all four offer some way that you can get tags associated with your posts. Increasingly, it’s a feature that’s being built into blogging software, particularly hosted blogging tools, such as Blogger and TypePad, which tend to offer bells and whistles in an easy way to encourage new users. But tagging can be added as a plug-in for WordPress and ExpressionEngine as well (and both of those already have sophisticated category features built in). This article has a quick look at all of them. The “new” Blogger offers tagging in the form of what it calls labels. At the bottom of the standard Posting window, you’ll see a small entry box where you can enter labels for that post that work just like keyword tags.

Once the keywords are added to a post, they’ll appear at the bottom of the post as links. Those links can then be clicked to see other posts on the blog that have similar labels. You can also add a list of your labels to the sidebar of your blog using the Template editor in Blogger. Here’s how:

1. Click the Template tab in the Blogger admin interface and make sure the Page Elements link is selected.

2. Click the link Add a Page Element in the sidebar of your template.

3. In the window that appears, click the Add to Blog button beneath the Labels option. That brings up the Configure Labels window.

4. In the Configure Labels window, you can choose whether your labels will be sorted alphabetically or by the frequency of the use of the label. Make your choice and click Save Changes. 5. Now, view your blog and you’ll see the new Labels element appear in your blog’s layout.

As you’ll see in later examples in this article, tags are often arranged in “tag clouds,” which make the tags a bit easier to see by their “weight” or frequency of use. Blogger doesn’t have a tag cloud option built in (as of this writing), but such an option has been “hacked” by some Blogger users. See http://phy3blog.googlepages.com/Beta-Blogger-Label-Cloud .html on the Web for hints. With TypePad, there’s an easy way to get tagging-like functionality and a hard way. The easy way is to simply use categories judiciously as you’re creating or editing your posts. While on the Post page in TypePad, you can choose a category for your post from the Category menu. The hard way isn’t really that hard, as long as you’re comfortable with editing templates. First, the Category menu offers you the command Add a New Category, which you can use to quickly create a new category that hasn’t been created previously. It’s not as easy as typing in a quick tag, but it’s a start. Second, the Category menu offers the command Assign Multiple Categories, which you can use to select more than one category for your blog entry. In the Select Categories window that appears, choose the categories you’d like to assign to this entry. Once selected, those multiple categories appear in the menu’s entry box. Now, save the entry and you’re ready to add your category list or cloud to the blog’s layout.

By default, TypePad shows a listing of categories, which can get a little unwieldy if you’re adding categories as if they were tags or keywords. So, the solution is to dig into the design of your TypePad blog and set up a category tag cloud. Here’s how:

1. In the TypePad admin interface, click the Design tab.

2. On the Design tab, choose Select Content.

3. In the Select Content window, turn off the option Categories and turn on the option Category Cloud.

4. Scroll to the bottom of the window and click Save Changes.

Now, if desired, click the Order Content link to dig in and change where the category cloud will appear. Otherwise, you can view your blog to see the new category cloud, which will show a compact list of your categories, with the categories that are used most often appearing larger than categories used less often. TypePad offers support for tagging in the portion of its Post window labeled Keywords. Once you’ve entered a post in TypePad, simply add to the Keywords entry area, separating your keywords with commas. By default, those keywords won’t appear in your blog’s design, but you can add them by editing an advanced template and adding the tag <$MTEntryKeywords$> to your template between the <$MTEntries$> tags. TypePad can also be used directly with Technorati as discussed later in the parts “Technorati” and “Digg and Rating Services.” Like TypePad, WordPress allows you to assign multiple categories to a single post and, within reason, you can use the built-in category to set up your blog posts so that they show up whenever a related category is chosen. WordPress doesn’t have a category cloud feature built in, but it can be added using a plug-in. Or, if you want to dig deeper into tagging your entries, there’s a plug-in for that, too. If your blog is text-focused (as opposed to a photo blog or an audio blog) then you can create a “category cloud,” which uses the built-in WordPress categories to create something very similar to a tag cloud. Here’s how:

1. Download the Category Cloud Widget from http://leekelleher.com/ wordpress/plugins/category-cloud-widget/.

2. Once downloaded, you install the widget just as you would a plug-in, by copying the file category-cloud.php to your wp-content/plugins/ folder.

3. Now, in the WordPress admin interface, click the Plugins tab.

4. You should see the Category Cloud Widget; on its row, click the Activate link.

5. Click the Presentation tab, then Widgets.

6. Now, locate the Category Cloud widget and drag it to your sidebar. You can click the small options box to change options for the widget. (For instance, you can set the minimum and maximum font sizes for your category cloud, set the alignment for the cloud, and so on.)

7. When you’re done arranging, click Save Changes.

That’s it. View your blog and you should see the new category cloud in your sidebar. As mentioned, WordPress doesn’t have true tagging built into it, but you can add it via a plug-in. The popular option is the Ultimate Tag Warrior (http://www .neato.co.nz/ultimate-tag-warrior/), a plug-in that makes it possible to add tags to your posts, turn your categories into tags, and display tags in a list or tag cloud on your blog. To use the plug-in, download it and install it as you would install any WordPress plug-in. Once installed, activate it by clicking the Activate button on the Plugin tab. Once activated, you’ll see new items on the Write page in the WordPress admin interface. At the bottom of the entry screen, you’ll see a Tags area where you can add tags, separating them with commas. You can also get suggestions for tags by clicking the Get Keyword Suggestions from Yahoo button that appears beneath the Tags entry box. Simply click any of the suggestions to add them to your post as a tag. Once you’ve entered all the tags that seem appropriate, click Publish to add the entry to your blog. Now, you’ll want to add a tag cloud to your blog’s template. To do that, you’ll need to edit the template and add some code. Here’s how:

1. Click the Presentation tab in the WordPress admin interface.

2. Click the Theme Editor tab.

3. Now, click the link labeled Sidebar. You should see the message “Editing sidebar.php” on the page; if not, you’ll need to set permissions for your index.php page via FTP before you can move on.

4. Based on how your sidebar is formatted, you need to add the following to an appropriate part of that sidebar:

<?php UTW_ShowWeightedTagSet("sizedtagcloud") ?>

5. Now, save the Template and check your site to see if it updated correctly.

Note that how your template is designed may dictate exactly how you add that item to the sidebar. For instance, in the Sidebar template for the WordPress Default theme, items are surrounded by list item tags. You may find that’s what you’re looking at in your template, or you may not necessarily need to use the <li>, </li> list item tags. Note also that there are different options for the UTW tag. For example, you can use a special tag for alphabetical listing of the tags, and set a limit to the number of tags shown, as in this example:

<?php UTW_ShowWeightedTagSetAlphabetical("coloredsizedtagcloud","","40") ?>

which looks like this in the browser window: For more details on the options for using and displaying tags in WordPress, visit the documentation at http://www.neato.co.nz/wpcontent/ plugins/UltimateTagWarrior/ultimate-tagwarrior- help.html on the Web.