Newbie questions

Aug 5, 2007

Newbie questions

Filed in Geekiness

As a newbie to the blogosphere (I’ve been drifting along in the shallows but now seem to have been sucked into the slipstream) I find myself with questions about how stuff works. This won’t help.

How do I figure out how many people are taking/reading my site’s feeds, for one?
Much more subjectively, do you use tags or categories, and tags and categories, and why, and how?

For a long time I’ve been realizing that categories as provided by Wordpress could easily become very unwieldy. What I’m leaning towards is getting rid of all my categories except for some very broad ones (Motorcycling, Blogging, that kind of wide and sweeping) and then using tags, which I acquired via a nice plugin, to attach much more detailed search terms to each post. Clicking on a tag brings up a page of related posts just like categories does, and to me it seems like doing things this way would be better than to end up agonizing over whether a post should go under Motorcycles or Links or Little Pink Teapots.

I suppose I have tagitis right now because I’m working on getting tags which I wrote up at Markeroni, too. (Don’t go looking for the tags. They’re not really ready yet.)

So I was wondering how you handle it, whether you obsess at night about which post goes where, and whether it matters to you whether it’s orderly or not. (Please feel free to send others to this blog because a) that’s fun and b) I’m really interested in hearing opinions on this.)

Subscription links

feed readers

Just a few random posts

Comments

8 Comments, Comment or Ping

Dan (1 comments.)

It seems to me that many Wordpress users like categories. Also categories are built into the basic structure of the system, so even if you replace them in practice with tags, you will still have a large amount of “Uncategorized” posts, and that usually becomes one of the tags. Also SEO plugins are not as capable of taking tag pages (a major “do not” with Google: let your tag and category pages gunk up their listings with duplicate content) out of the pages that are listed.
Having said all that I still use tags on my Wordpress blog. I think that they are good for labeling posts in more numerous and flexible ways and easier to scale than categories. I like some things about the Simple Tagging plugin but the most popular one right now is probably Ultimate Tag Warrior.

Aug 5th, 2007
Polliwog (48 comments.)

Hi there. I don’t like unwieldy category lists so I tried to make mine pretty broad for the things I knew I’d be blogging about. I read somewhere that 10-15 categories is about right but I’m sure that is objective. I’ve also read that you don’t need a category if you don’t think it will eventually have at least 3 posts in it.

I do use Technorati Tags at the end of all my posts but it is a personal thing because that is how I search for other blogs on a certain topic.

Aug 5th, 2007
pussreboots (158 comments.)

I know how many readers I have from my web logs. I also have a little program that does nightly reports on my traffic which I then double check against my own number crunching in excel. It’s not elegant but it works for me.

I don’t know how your site is set up to even know if you’re generating a nightly log of traffic to your site. If you’re not, there are other ways around the issue that I can help you with.

Aug 5th, 2007
Linda R. Moore

Hi Dan

Thanks for this information! You’re right about the search engines of course, but I think I’m still going to stick with the tags because they help with the related posts functions, which in turn (should) keep people on my site a bit longer.

I picked Simple Tagging because I was actually looking for a program to do “related posts” and figured I could do everything in one shot.

I don’t think we’ve met! How did you find my site, do you know?

Aug 6th, 2007
Linda R. Moore

Hi Polli

I believe that the tags I am using automagically tags my feed for Technorati. I’ll find out soon enough :)

Yup, I know my categories are getting out of hand already. So I’m thinking of using tags more for creating access to related posts than anything else. It’ll be interesting to see how all that goes…

Aug 6th, 2007
Linda R. Moore

This is set up like a hosting provider would be, so I do have the logs. I’ll have to see if I can figure out where the feed info. is to be found.

Thanks!

Aug 6th, 2007
pussreboots (158 comments.)

OK. I could email you a sample of the relevant bits of my logs to give you an idea of what to look for in yours.

For example you’ll want to look for
http://www.ravensroads.com/index.php/feed/atom/
http://www.ravensroads.com/index.php/feed/

to see who are directly subscribed. Your livejournal feed will also show up and tell you the number of LJ subscribers. For example, here’s mine: “LiveJournal.com (webmaster@livejournal.com; for http://www.livejournal.com/users/caligula03/; 27 readers)”

There are a bunch of other reader services out there that you might see in your log files: topicblogs, Blogarithm, Bloglines, and so forth.

Aug 6th, 2007
Linda R. Moore

Aha! I see them :)

Ooh, that’s kind of neat :)

Aug 6th, 2007