With the addition of tagging in WordPress, it has caused many bloggers to have to adjust their approach to handling categories on their blogs.

I personally used to have about 25 categories on this blog. Unfortunately, I often found that a single post would overlap and go into several categories. In my opinion, it also provided a bad first impression to many readers who use your categories as a way to determine what types of topics you frequently discuss.

After a lot of internal debate, I decided to drop it down to roughly 10 total categories and use tags for additional organization when necessary. So far, this has worked pretty well and I feel it gives my readers a better first impression.

If you decide to do some fall blog cleaning and consolidate some of your categories, you can easily do this using the Batch Categories WordPress plugin. This plugin allows you to reassign an entire category to another category, then you can delete the category you no longer need. For example, I took my Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer categories recently and moved them all to a new category called Web Browsers. Once satisfied with the transfer, I then deleted the 3 categories I no longer needed.

Once I was happy with my categories, I needed any easier way to find appropriate tags and stay consistent. That is where the Recommended Tags WordPress plugin came into play. This plugin allows me to find the most relevant tags for my posts.

How do you handle categories? And how many is to many?