Welcome to Week Six: Tags and Categories with Lorelle VanFossen

In this week’s session, we’re going to talk about blog categories and tags.

As you go through the exercises listed below, use the following three step filter:

Your tags and categories must:

1. Group related content into “bodies of work”
2. Provide navigation to related content
3. Send a clear message about your blog’s content

As recommended in the tags and categories class notes, take each task one at a time before reading the next one.

• TASK 1: Make a list of all the words that describe your blog subject. List a minimum of 25 words or phrases.
• TASK 2: Cull down the list of descriptive words and phrases to 5-10 “groups” representing the words on the list.
• TASK 3: Edit your blog category list to represent the post content within each category.
• TASK 4: Edit your blog category list to represent keywords and search terms best representative of the post content within each category.
• TASK 6: Write FIVE blog post titles/ideas under each category.
• TASK 7: Re-examine your brainstorm list. These are now your post tags, the descriptive words that described the meta data of your post content. They are your blog keywords.
• TASK 8: List the tag words for the featured blog post content in the class document.
• TASK 9: Share the lessons learned about rethinking your blog categories here, on the boards, and/or on your blog and link us.
• Optional: Upload and share your Wordle image.

For more specifics, see the class notes.

Remember, a tag can be any link:

<a href="http://example.com/" rel="tag">Example</a>

Tags are the link text (anchor text):

<a title="Example of Example" href="http://example.com/" rel="tag">Example</a>

I’ve scattered some tag links throughout this blog post. Look at the page source code to see how many you can find.

Open for Discussion

I get a lot of questions about tags and categories. They are an often misunderstood bloggy beast. To start us off, here are two of the most common questions I am asked about tags and categories.

What’s the difference in WordPress between a tag and a category?

WordPress only supported categories for a long time, long before other blogging platforms offered them. When Technorati started their blog post taxonomy (tags) directory, tags for labeling content by micro data categorization came into popularity. By adding rel="tag" to any link, that link text became a tag.

WordPress Themes added the rel="tag" to categories soon afterwards, but resisted the notion of adding tags. Tagging post content is not as easy as it may seem. Tags are designed to not only categorize content, they must be searchable and able to be accessed in a variety of ways, such as related content (synonyms).

When tags were finally introduced to WordPress by popular demand, WordPress kept categories as tags and tags were tags, all identified by the rel="tag" as tags, since it didn’t matter to Technorati if the keyword was a tag or category – any link with that relevance attribute was a “tag.” WordPress users were very confused.

In general, WordPress creates a “search results” page listing the posts in chronological order when the user clicks upon a tag or a category. The page title changes, identifying it as a tag or category pageview, but the results are basically the same. If you are using a WordPress Plugin which displays post content using tags, such as related content, related post titles can be displayed on the post itself (usually in the post meta data area with the date and other information), or on the sidebar. Tag clouds are show on Pages or often found in the sidebar, header, or even the footer.

I use WordPress.com and do not want my tags to link to everyone’s content. How do I change that?

As a fellow blogger on WordPress.com, I totally sympathize. I’ve nagged the staff for years to permit global (off-site) and local (on-site) tagging options, but so far, the response has been to set all WordPress.com post tags to global only. The theory is that this increases the exposure of your blog content for those who search those tag pages or use those keywords.

Personally, I hate it and rarely use them. This means I have to manually create my own site search tags. I do so at the bottom of most of my blog posts using a JavaScript Browser Bookmarklet described in A Tagging Bookmarklet for WordPress and WordPress.com Users. The JavaScript creates a set of links with tag words that link to a site search of my site.

I recommend that if you are frustrated by the lack of a local tagging option, you join me in passing on your thoughts through the WordPress.com feedback.

Now, it’s your turn. How can I help you learn more about tags and categories and how to categorize and structure your blog post content?

A few weeks ago, I warned students about the necessity of keeping their WordPress blog updated. If your blog is hosted on wordpress.com, it is updated. This warning is for self hosted blogs. The latest version, WordPress 2.8.4, closes a hole in previous versions that allowed hackers to create a backdoor administrator account on your blog.

Unfortunately, a lot of WordPress bloggers did NOT heed the warning to update that appeared at the top of their blog administration panel. A serious attack has been launched this weekend and hundreds of blogs have already been affected. Mashable it doing their part to spread the word about this attack and the need to upgrade immediately to WordPress 2.8.4.

How serious is this threat? Lorelle VanFossen tells her readers to stop reading her post until the reader is sure that their blog is updated. Don’t worry about finding out if your blog is affected first. She instructs WordPress bloggers to do the update first, then take a look to see if the blog was compromised. Lorelle offer two clues to look for:

There are strange additions to the pretty permalinks, such as example.com/category/post-title/%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode($_SERVER%5BHTTP_REFERER%5D))%7D%7D|.+)&%/. The keywords are “eval” and “base64_decode.”

The second clue is that a “back door” was created by a “hidden” Administrator. Check your site users for “Administrator (2)” or a name you do not recognize. You will probably be unable to access that account, but Journey Etc. has a possible solution.

What to do if your blog is affected?

These hacks are digging down deep into WordPress installations, even the database may be affected. The severity of the attack will determine how much work you have to do to eradicate it. Lorelle’s post details options and instructions on how to repair the damage. In addition, prevention is always the best route and Lorelle reviews some of the best measures to secure your blog. Even if you blog is not affected, it is well worth your time to review her advice on securing your blog.

Please note: I have seen a number of bogus registration attempts on blogs this past week. Even if your blog is up to date, you can help secure your blog by turning off the Anyone can register option. Go to Settings > Membership options to turn off this feature.

I am so pleased to announce that Lorelle VanFossen,  aka the Fairy Blog Mother, will be a guest instructor for the Blogging for Fun, Fame and Fortune class at LVS Online this coming session!

Lorelle VanFossen has been around the WordPress and WordCamp map. She’s presented keynotes and programs at WordCamps in Israel, San Francisco, Hawaii, Dallas, Toronto, Whistler, Portland, and will be speaking in Holland, Israel, and other places in the world in the next few months. She is the host of the Lorelle on WordPress, providing WordPress and blogging tips for bloggers of all levels, and a long time contributor to the Blog Herald. A web publishing consultant, she also serves as the editor-in-chief of Woopra, the hot new web analtyics program that is changing the web, and works with Bitwire Media and hosts the Liz and Lorelle Show podcast with Liz Strauss and featured contributor on WordCast, the WordPress podcast with Dave Moyer and Kym Huynh. Lorelle is the author of the fast-selling book, “Blogging Tips: What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging”.

Lorelle VanFossen will be a guest instructor, presenting the content for one of the lessons in this six week blogging studio. In addition  to providing her expertise, insight and humor during the written lesson, Lorelle will be available that week of the course to answer your questions on the class message board. This is a great opportunity to interact with Lorelle and I am so grateful that she will be joining us this session.

The first lesson is on 8/29/09. The registration deadline is 8/26/09.