Blog Exercises: Dissecting Post Categories

In a recent article, Noah Weiss shared his struggle to figure out categories and tags on his personal site. I know many of you following these Blog Exercises have also struggled to figure out your categories, so I thought Noah’s site would be a perfect example, He has gratefully given me permission to rip his […]

Using WordPress Categories To Style Posts

By Abhijit Nadgouda UPDATED 2010: See below One of the reasons WordPress fits so many bills is its flexibility. It lets you do things at a much lesser cost, not necessarily money, but time and effort too, as compared to others. This article is about styling WordPress posts differently using the categories they are classified […]

One Year Anniversary Review: Tags, Tagging, and Categories

This past year was proclaimed by many as the Year of the Tag as Technorati’s tag services and features roared onto our blogs. By December of 2005, there was barely a blog without some form of tags on display. Panic turned from not getting into Google fast enough to not showing up fast enough on […]

Putting Some Thought Into Blog Categories and Tags

There has been a lot of talk about the differences and similarities between categories and tags, and how to implement their use. I’d like to talk about the process of choosing categories for your posts. But first, let’s take a moment to examine what categories and tags are. What are Categories and Tags? In the […]

Tags Are Not Categories – Got It?

Tags are Not Categories by Carthik Sharma agrees with my opinion that categories are not the same as tags, and he makes a good point. Categories organize, hierarchically. Tags need not. Tags provide meta-information, Categories need not. Tags cross-connect, Categories do not. By cross connect, I mean, when you go looking for posts tagged with […]

Creating Multiple Single Posts for Different Categories

Tips Apply to the Full Version of WordPress. I had a unique challenge. I needed to assign a specific stylesheet for only one category of blog posts in a WordPress blog. There are a lot of ways of doing this, but I wanted it to be fast and simple. I choose to use a WordPress […]

Show Just One Category in WordPress Categories

Tip Applies to the Full Version of WordPress A challenge come up on the forum for a user who had a very interesting wish. When clicking on a category from the main page, he wanted a page showing the categories, but ONLY the categories from that category, not the children of the categories. Let me […]

Categories versus Tags: Defining the Limitations

I recently talked about categories and tags, what they do and which one to choose and adding Technorati tags to WordPressMU sites, like wordpress.com, and I want to share with you a recent struggle I went through on this issue. I have spent the past five days debating about the name of a new category […]

Categories versus Tags – What’s the Difference and Which One?

Categories and Tags are for your visitors, not just search engines. Think of your visitors’ needs first. Categories and Tags are about navigation and sorting, grouping your content to help visitors find related information. Categories and Tags are not fashion statements. Don’t be colorful or imaginative with either. Categories are your site’s table of contents. […]

Blog Exercises: When Will You Not Link?

There are few people I hate in this world. I think I can count them on one hand, mostly on two fingers. We all have them, people who did us wrong and taught us to disrespect, dread, dislike, and even hate them. As tolerant as we wish we all were, that’s just the way of […]

Blog Exercises: How Many Words in a Link?

How many words should you put into a link? Is there a rule? There isn’t a rule but there are good standards and practices. These state that two words should be the minimum, and only enough words to compel someone to click through to the linked source. The words must also imply the link’s destination […]

Blog Exercises: How to Tag Posts

Categories are your site’s table of contents. Tags are your index words. While it is simple to explain the two basic organizational and navigation elements of a WordPress site, coming up with tags for each post is a struggle many bloggers battle. Tags represent micro-categorization of your site’s content. It helps the visitor find closely […]

Blog Exercises: Where Are You?

After agreeing to take on a writing assignment regarding Oregon history, I happily settled down to do a little preliminary online research. Because some of the towns I needed to research were located in areas I was not completely familiar with, I was relying on their local websites to point me to what I needed […]

Blog Exercises for February

We’ve completed the second month of Blog Exercises in February. Are you still with me? Here is the list. Blog Exercises: Taking a Risk With What You Blog About Blog Exercises: Honor the Past with Anniversaries and Birthdays Blog Exercises: Your Byline Blog Exercises: Comments and The Blog Bullies Blog Exercises: Backlinks Blog Exercises: Category […]

Blog Exercises: Category Cross-Pollination

In these Blog Exercises, I am faced with a category quandary. For the most part, these are blogging tips, so they should go into my Blogging Tips category as well as Blog Exercises category, right? Maybe right. These Blog Exercises are meant to have some form of order, though they may be done in any […]