Solipsus

With the recent release of WordPress 2.3: Dexter, came what seemed to be a major new feature: tags. And so far, I have not yet even attempted to use them, but not because I don’t know how to use them, and it would be unfair for me to judge them and say I don’t like them without having used them, but I just don’t get them!

Today at school, it was rather boring so I had a lot of thinking time to get my head around how to base this argument: whilst categories are still available and both can be used side by side; which one is better and more effective?

Categories allow the user to put their posts into a subject. For example this post is posted under ‘Geek’ and is where I put all my thoughts about Mac programmes, Solipsus updates and WordPress reading. This works a lot like your subjects at school; English, Maths and Science, etc. Each completely different.

With categories, I can see the logic that webmasters will want to keep separate topics… well, separate! This also allows easy archive use and navigation via these categories. For example, you can navigate all my posts that were categorised under Geek, or even Rant.

On the other hand, we have tags which pick up on all the ‘mini-subjects’ so to speak, within a post. Again using the analogy of our school subjects, Maths has mini-subjects like Differentiation, Integration, etc. For example, within this post I could use the tags WordPress 2.3, tags and categories.

And this is where I have my problem, what purpose do they serve that categories don’t? Sure, a reader of my blog will be able to instantly see what ‘mini-subjects’ I touch upon without having to read the full post first. But can’t the reader be able to see that from the category, but without as much detail. How certain are you that you would use those tags again? It is something which I am quite baffled by.

This is assuming, that these are both used independently and without the other. So something else I wondered is can they be used side by side. With writing this blog, I could see that categories are more effective in the fact that on their own they are still great - I mean, WordPress users were able to survive many previous versions with just categories! With tags, as well, I can see that they would be effective for the user as said above, without loosing the possibilities of navigation that categories have, and it cuts down on the number of categories! I might even start using them, but is it worth the hassle? Having to think of the right tags for each post you write? I suppose that is just me being lazy, but who knows?

Ben