Can I tag along?
Yesterday’s serendipitous discovery of TagCloud has led to a few other developments since then :p I realized after watching my tag cloud for a while yesterday that it wasn’t changing at all – it was simply displaying the tags for wordsmith.org and nothing at all from my own blog entries. So I decided to do some digging to see what was going on. I still am not sure what exactly is wrong with TagCloud because I had assumed that the Yahoo Content Analysis service basically went through your site and figured out what the relevant tags for your entries were instead of you having to set up tags for each entry. However, nothing seemed to be happening – maybe their indexing service was slow or maybe it wasn’t functional. All I know is that even after 24 hours, my site was not displaying any tags.
So, I decided to look for alternatives tailored specifically towars WordPress 🙂 Or more accurately, I wanted to find something for WP which would generate tags in case I was wrong about TagCloud and they actually needed the tags somehow explicitly specified in the RSS feed. That was when I came across this blog post – now here was a solution (and a total solution at that :p) to what I’d been looking for. So I went over to the Ultimate Tag Warrior page, downloaded the plugin and installed it. I removed my existing TagCloud entry on my blog and added my own personalized tag cloud for my site. But nothing still showed up!
Why not? Because none of my entries had existing tags :p So now I had to find a way to add the tags to get a tag cloud. I spent a little time doing the entries by hand and trying to figure out what tags to assign before giving it up as too time consuming. The Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin does have a button which is supposed to retrieve the suggested tags for each entry from Tagyu but for some reason, the button wouldn’t work – at least at my end. I decided to go through the source and see what was happening and if necessary, write a plugin of my own which would connect to Tagyu and pull suggested tags for each entry at the time of publishing. Perhaps I could adapt the system to also go through all my existing entries and add tags …. So I have a new project to work on … Not that I really wanted one but oh well, need something to keep life interesting, right? :p
I’ve not gotten Tagyu to work since the first week I installed the Ultimate Tag Warrior WordPress Plugin. Ignore it. What you can do is “automatically” generate tags based upon your categories. Since it appears your blog is designed more with dates in mind (Do people really “remember” or care about “when” you posted as much as they care about what? It’s a good question to consider.) and not categories (couldn’t find any), this may be a problem. UTW will automatically convert all categories into tags. Since all categories in WordPress, unless you’ve removed that option from your WordPress Theme, are automatically labeled as tags, so this is an easy thing to do.
Remember, categories are the same but different from tags, but living without categories can really hurt you. Tags are new and an option but categories are of serious benefit, whereas dates aren’t, in general.
I found that while using categories for tags in UTW was okay, it wasn’t complete. I took advantage of the opportunity to not only put tags on many (still working on it) of my old posts but to also create more intra-site links, connecting old posts with new ones, a very important thing to do.
But pain in the butt, time consuming for sure.
In my case, the absense of categories has a rather simple explanation – I don’t blog via the WP interface :p I use my own program, Blog, to send entries to WP via the XMLRPC interface. This does result in some limitations to the standard form of WP posting since when Blog was originally written, the XMLRPC interface did not support categories. I don’t know if WP now supports sending categories via the XMLRPC interface. Guess I’ll have to investigate :p