HomeClassification
In which we discuss tagging and filksonomies
Another design point that’s come up as part of the Grand Redesign I keep promising you: tagging. The little bundle of links at the bottom of each post that I didn’t really think did very much.
I was a latecomer to tagging. When this site first started, it didn’t have any for the first month or so. After a while I started adding them, pointing them to Technorati. Back then, the site was running on WordPress version 1.5.something, and it didn’t have any built-in tagging support. I was trying to avoid using too many WordPress plugins, and I didn’t think that tag management (as distinct from tagging per se) mattered all that much; so I wrote all the tags manually. Like this, at the end of each post, with the <a> element repeated for each tag:
<small>Keyword noise: <a class="tag" rel="tag" href="…">tag1</a>, …</small>Which worked, quite well; there was a visually distinct “tag” class, because I wanted tag links – which all led to Technorati back then – to be visually distinct from regular links which would go to whatever they were about.
Things move on, though, and WordPress has since gained built-in tagging functionality. Given that I’m redesigning the whole site, and putting in new built-from-scratch layout templates, I thought I may as well switch to using a more organising tagging system. For one thing, it means less typing each time I write a post. All that code up above is replaced by one little chunk in the template:
<p id="thetags"><small><?php the_tags('Keyword noise: ', ', ' ,");?></small></p>This one covers all the tags, calling a Wordpress API function to pull them out of the database and convert them into HTML. I know all those commas and quotes look a bit confusing; but really they’re not that bad. And the point is: this is in the template, not in each post. That bit of code there only has to be written once; the previous chunk had to be typed out every time. The most awkward part is that WordPress isn’t flexible enough to let you set the class of each link individually, hence the <p class="…"> at the start.
The big change this leads to, though, is that the tag links no longer point to Technorati. Now, they point back to the site itself: tag page requests generate a page containing every post marked with that tag. And, already, that’s shown that people do indeed click on the tags. People, particularly people coming from searches, do seem to use them. Whether they find them useful or not is another matter, of course, now that they point back within the site and not to a broader variety of opinions on the matter; but they do get used.
Doing it this way means that I put more tags on each post, simply because there’s much less typing to do. Conversion, though, is going to be a bit of a job. Right now there are 760-odd posts on this site, all of which I’m having to reread and re-tag. It’s going to take a while, but hopefully the majority of it will be done by the time the new design is finished.* The only problem with this transitional phase is that: the current template is, because of its age, completely unaware of tags. So it doesn’t really know what a tag-based archive page is; so when you click on a tag, there’s no explanation as to what you’re looking at. I’m not sure if this is going to be a problem for you readers or not; and, hopefully, it’s only going to be a short-lived situation.
The word “folksonomy” has often been used to describe this sort of tagging system. I’m not sure it’s an ideal term for what I’m doing, though. “Filksonomy” might be more relevant: a bit like a folksonomy, but rather more whimsical and silly.
*** In any case, there are plenty of other parts of the new design that also need each post checking and potentially editing.