All Posts Tagged With: "19"

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?

The idea of tags has become the standard in today’s blogging and it always surprised me that WordPress didn’t offer tags built directly into their software. As a result, I’ve been an avid user of the Ultimate Tagging Warrior plugin (UTW) for as long as I remember, probably since I made the switch to WordPress in the first place.

With yesterday’s release of WordPress 2.3, the tagging system we have been waiting for was finally built directly into WordPress. The problem is that this new tagging feature is very basic and won’t compare to popular tagging plugins UTW and Simple Tagging.

My personal preference would be to use the tagging system built into WordPress 2.3, but still have that added functionality that some of those plugins offer. It looks like Ryan felt the same why, but unlike me, he luckily has the skills to make it happen!

Yesterday Ryan unveiled a new plugin he called Recommended Tags, which uses WordPress 2.3’s built-in tagging system, but will actually give you tag recommendations on your Write panel. It includes some features that are needed for this type of plugin, including the ability to locate plural tags, or useful tags that maybe only share one word (Ryan gives the examples of your article mentioning Vista but your tag is Windows Vista or your post mentioning download, but your tag is downloads).

Currently Ryan has this early version available, but he gave me the heads up that he is hard at work on the next version, which will give the user more flexibility in the Options panel, as well as add a type-ahead autocompletion feature which sounds exciting.

I have gone ahead and added it to my Best of: WordPress Plugins list and encourage anyone to give it a try that has made the upgrade to WordPress 2.3.

Update: Ryan has just posted that an update was made to this plugin to include the additional features discussed above!

When it comes to blogging, there is a reason that it has become so popular over the past few years, and that reason is the ability to interact directly with the author and other readers of the blog. All successful bloggers have two things on their website. The first is an About page, which allows readers to get to know a little bit more about the author. A picture on the About page is recommended, but is not always required for success.

The other thing, and the most important thing a blog needs in my opinion, is to have a Contact page, which will allow readers to get in contact with the author. This can be for a variety of reasons, ranging from questions about the blog or content to actually making a comment about the blog or to notify the author of a problem on the blog.

In an effort to make myself more accessible to my readers, when I first started blogging I originally placed an e-mail icon on my website, but I quickly learned that I would get a lot more spam than I would actual e-mails from readers. When I switched to WordPress, I noticed there were several contact forms available, which allow your readers to contact you without actually displaying your e-mail address for spammers to find.

It all started with Ryan Duff’s WP-Contact Form, but this plugin quickly spawned several other improved contact forms. Here are a few other improved contact forms that are available:

• Contact Form ][
• PXS Mail Form
• Enhanced Contact Form

I’ve tried all three and felt they worked, but they weren’t exactly what I was looking for. I noticed while contacting Sarah over at BlueJar that she had an amazing contact form, so of course I asked what it was. She sent me over to Douglas Karr’s plugin, which is also called WP-Contact Form.

While the name is the same, it has a lot of added functionality. I’m able to easily add a drop-down menu from the Options panel, include a challenge question to avoid spam, as well as add the ability for the form user to carbon-copy themselves if they choose to. It also shows what is entered into the website field when you receive an e-mail, which for some reason isn’t included in the other plugins I tried.

As an added bonus, with my minimal coding knowledge, I was able to easily edit the length and width of the fields and customize the colors to match my site from within the plugin. I also used the author’s contact form to recommend that this functionality be included in the Options panel of a future release of this plugin.

If you are a WordPress user and don’t have a contact form, or you just aren’t happy with the one you are using, I recommend giving this one a shot.

Download WP-Contact Form