BrianJarrett.com

Finally I was able to upgrade my site to Wordpress 2.3 . Initially it broke during the process and I had to restore everything then try again when I had more time. Turns out the BlogStats plugin didn’t work and I had what appears to be a deprecated category function call in my theme (wp_list_cats).

One of the more interesting things with this upgrade is tags. Tags, at least how I’ve implemented them, are sort of like micro categories. I like to think of categories as macro and tags as micro. For instance, I have a category called Programming . This is a high-level categorization of post about the topic of programming. Within this category, however, are sub-topics like Perl, ETL, Visual Basic, etc. So what I do is then tag the article with these keywords.

You can use tags in two ways; each article that has been tagged will display a list of these tags. You can click on any of these tags and see all the other articles that also share these tags. The other method is to use the tag cloud, located in the sidebar near the bottom. This will display all the tags used on all the articles but will display more frequently used tags in bigger font. So if I have fifty articles on Perl but only one article on aquariums, then you’ll see the word ‘perl’ in bigger letters and ‘aquariums’ in smaller letters.

I doubt I’ll go back and retrofit 170+ articles with tags but I might do some of them. I will use them going forward; hopefully they’ll make things a little easier.