Has anyone ever ripped the tag off of a pillow, just to spite those people that think they have jurisdiction over your pillow? I’m not saying if I have or not, I’m generally a law abiding citizen, however, that’s not the tags I’m talking about anyway.
I am talking about tags in relation to blogs. Is anyone else using tags on their blog? Does anyone else know what a tag is?
I seem to have too much time on my hands this week and that is generally when I start tweaking things on the ol’ blog. Tags have fascinated me for awhile now and something that seems really cool is tag clouds. Let’s back up here and look at the big picture.
The reason I am fascinated with tags and tag clouds is because of my fascination with del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site. It’s a site where I can bookmark anything I want and when I do that, I assign tags to it. Anyone can view anyone else’s del.icio.us page (click here for mine) and all the tags are shared. For instance, if I tag something as utilities, then if you click that tag, you will see everyone in the world that has a del.icio.us account with anything tagged as utilities. It’s a way to share information and create a vast network of information. Pretty cool, eh?
Now, I’m trying to bring del.icio.us to my blog in a way that makes sense. The tag cloud displays all of your tags, which are basically categories, but it shows the more popular tags in a bigger font. So the more a particular tag is used, the larger the font in your cloud. Deli.cio.us has a pretty foolproof way of creating the code for you to create a tag cloud on your blog, according to your specs, however, I’m not able to display my tag cloud as it should look on my blog. The text looks just like the rest of the blog, small and boring. After repeating the same steps expecting different results (insanity ? ), I opened a trouble ticket with my highly capable, highly technical, highly css-aware wife and she informed me that my css will over-ride all formatting. That was the conclusion I had drawn but was hoping for a loophole. She mocked up some code for me with a general guideline of what I should add to the stylesheet to create my desired effect and was then told that she had actual paying clients that she had to devote her attention to. This was all done via e-mail this morning and since I have actual expectations on me to be productive at my office, I have not exactly had the opportunity to complete this little personal project.
However, there are ways to entice Mary to help me out, if I get desperate. Maybe a late night ice cream run or something (don’t tell the kids!) But, I did find a couple of plugins today that will just drop the tag cloud on there, so I’ll investigate a little more tonight and figure out what is best, the coding or the plug-in. I want to dissect this whole idea of tagging in more detail also. Technorati does tagging, as well as del.icio.us and supposedly WordPress categories automatically become tags.
Anyone else done anything with tagging or tag clouds? I feel like I should be asking ‘Anyone else not have anything better to do?’ but this is cool stuff.
To be continued…….
Step away from the admin panel and nobody gets hurt. Hop in the car, drive to Sonic for a Gingerbread Blast and you might get your site done. We’ll see.
Check out tagcloud.com. I’ve been using Tag Cloud for a month or two on my blog. I have a few complaints, but overall it works for me. Tag Cloud essentially sifts through your blog entries and brings out the words it feels are important enough for tags. There are pros and cons to this. Also, the load time is occasionally slow as it reaches out to Tag Cloud to get the information. One benefit is that you can edit the CSS to skin the cloud to suit your blog and modify the size of your cloud.
There are several WordPress plugins that perform tagging duties and may offer more control. I wanted to review Tag Cloud, so that is why I chose their service. Several of the WP plugins I found looked promising.
Jim … how come when I try to leave you a comment this box never word wraps correctly? My text flows under the right hand navigation bar to the point where I can no longer see it then at some point it does wrap…but again there’s text I can’t see. Using IE6. I can send screenshot if needed. Ok back to your post…
I’m missing something with all this tag/cloud stuff. People subscribed to a blog will rarely if ever actually view your blog since they’re using bloglines are similar. So they/I will never see your cloud…so what’s the point of putting on your blog? I’ve not paid any attention to this tagging stuff os I want to know if I’m missing something I really should be paying attention to
Guess I need to go check out delicious too.
Jason, I have seen the comment box be wider than the screen before, but have never been able to consistently recreate it. It may actually be an IE6 issue, I use Firefox 1.5 and don’t get it. Actually, thru a series of events, not exactly related to this blog, everything got blown away last night. Mary was working on another site of mine, and inadvertantly wiped this one out. My last backup was from Dec. 8, which is why this is the last post out there right now, I have basically lost a month of posts. I say all of that to say I’m getting ready to redesign this blog again and hopefully fix the comment box issue. I’ll have to check it on IE6, that may actually be the problem. IE is a pain with web design, that’s for sure.
As far as tag clouds go, I’m with you. I went there,tried it out, and decided it was way over rated. You are correct when you say nobody really ever will see it. I did get it worked out so I could tag every post I did with a Technorati tag, but it was since this post, so they are all gone now. For WordPress, it’s a plugin and you add tags, similar to categories.Then out in the blogosphere, you could search for a particular tag and see related pages. That’s kinda cool but I’ve never actually found it useful, I’m tagging my posts now more as a way to better understand it all. I use del.icio.us quite a bit for bookmarking sites and they are tagged. With deli.cio.us, you can tag pages however you want.
So, with tagging, I have just been trying all kinds of things to understand it better. There’s value there, but it’s still so new that there’s not much clarity. My big question right now is the relationship between technorati tags and del.icio.us tags. My posts, that are now gone, had technorati tags and I also tag my del.icio.us links with del.icio.us tags and I’m not real clear how they play with each other. There’s some relation, but have not figured it out yet.
Check out my del.icio.us at del.icio.us/okwithat and you will see all of my links and how they are tagged. You can group tags together, which I have done just a little bit.
I hope this helps.