All Posts Tagged With: "18"

As we continue to roll towards the New Year, the great content keeps on coming. Here are a few of the posts that I enjoyed from around the blogosphere this week:

• ComputerWorld has posted 5 Things You’ll Love About Firefox 3.0. This post covers some of the stuff that many people aren’t talking about with the new version of Firefox 3.0.
• Hack WordPress explains how to adjust the blogroll code to separate your categories. Most themes by default come with the old blogroll code that doesn’t give you much control over how your blogs are displayed.
• Digital Inspiration explains why you should at least consider using FeedBlitz over Feedburner for managing your e-mail subscriptions.  I personally prefer the simplicity of Feedburner, but Amit makes some good points.
• Social Media Trader has ranked 115 social news and bookmarking services.  Click over to see who came in at number 1.

Just like pretty much everything else in the world, the blogosphere will often go through trends. These trends can be seen in a variety of ways and range anywhere from blogging setup, to blogging subject matter, or even to blogging themes.

Some would say blogging has become a copycat world, but I would say its the opposite. Bloggers are now struggling to stand out among a flood of similar blogs and form their own online identity. One of the ways that bloggers are attempting to do this is through creating or purchasing a unique theme for their site. Theme makers have sprouted up out of nowhere with “unique” themes for sale, yet they all seem to have the exact same setup and a slightly different stylesheet, failing to make the blog stand out.

The latest trend seems to be blogs shifting to more of a Content Management System (CMS), or a hub for all of their information.  So, what is the best way for the average blogger to do this?  This is where Magazine Style WordPress themes have stepped in to fill the void. A few of these have been around for awhile and are available to WordPress bloggers for free, but a number of premium (paid) themes have launched over the past month with the success of Brian Gardner’s Revolution theme.

Is blogging evolving? Some sites such as ProBlogger have had a lot of success with switching to a CMS, but I don’t think this is a good step for the average blogger. Do you offer video blogging? What about podcasts? Bloggers whose sites go beyond traditional blogging seem to be a good fit for Magazine style themes, while people who just write probably are not good candidates for this type of theme.

If you are interested in switching to a magazine style WordPress theme, I have compiled a visual display of the best magazine style themes over at Hack WordPress. As you can see, the list is not overwhelming yet, but I imagine the list will grow as more theme designers recognize this trend and begin creating more of these themes.

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?