easier tagging
I've talked before about how to set up a tagging system for your blog using entry keywords. If you're using Movable Type 3.2, the Tagwire plugin can make this quite a bit easier. It treats your existing keywords as tags - if you've already been entering tag-like keywords for your entries, you don't have to do anything extra, just start using the template tags to display information about your tags.
Tagwire also integrates with MT-XSearch to easily create individual pages for each tag. On my other set up, I was using MT's built in search script with a few hacks and an alternate search template. Tagwire with MT-XSearch is the same idea, but much easier to implement. As a note, if you have multiple blogs, you will need to create the XSearch Tagwire template module for each one, which also means that you can completely customize it for each blog.
I had been using keywords on this blog for a long time to indicate related entries. In a way, they're really like a secondary set of categories. That's now reflected in the sidebar where the actual categories are listed under the heading "Tips by Type". The keyword/tags/secondary categories are now listed as "Tips by Area".
It's all about making it easier for visitors to find related content, keeping them on your site longer and hopefully helping them with what they're looking to do.
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Did you read my idea in this posting?
Tutorial: Kreatives Tagging im Movable Type Weblog
Hope it will be a good read for you.
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Posted by: Joerg Petermann | March 17, 2006 07:43 AM
Thanks for that link, Joerg! I'm not able to read German, but I think I can figure out the .htaccess trick from it. That looks really neat! I'll look into doing it if I have the time.
Posted by: Al-Munaqabah | March 17, 2006 06:33 PM
It looks like you're using categories and tags for your posts. Is that right? As I understand it, you're adding a post to a main category, then tagging the post with additional terms that can be queried by clicking on them. Interesting strategy. Pretty slick.
Are your tag query pages getting indexed by search engines? I'm not sure if that really matters since there are other avenues to reach the same content, but I'm curious.
Posted by: Ed Kohler | March 20, 2006 08:28 AM
Hi Ed,
Thanks for dropping by! Yeah, that's what I'm doing here. I'm using a different tagging strategy for one of my other blogs, but I do tend to treat the tags sort of like categories in that I'm creating "tag archive pages" so that people can view all my posts with a certain tag on one page.
I may try a different model with one of my other blogs, to see how that works too.
I actually blocked my tag pages from search engines, because the search engine spiders were hitting them all the time and using up too many server resources when the search script runs to generate the pages.
If that's not a concern for you, then as long as you link to the tag pages from other pages that are already indexed, the search engines should pick them up.
Posted by: Al-Munaqabah | March 20, 2006 03:24 PM