I upgraded my WordPress to the new version 2.3. One of the big new features is tagging built into WP. Right now there is a field under where I’m typing to let you enter tags.

So I started just putting words in there that were key words from the post. Then I went to add the tag tags to my template so I could show them under the post. Problem was I had taken the approach that categories were tags. You don’t see the word “category” anywhere on my site. On my archives page there is a tag cloud of the WP categories.

So tags were often redundant. And there are thousands of posts with no tags. WP2.3 doesn’t seem to have a tag that says “does this post have tags?”. So an empty tag label was on most posts on the site.

The other problem with tags is for them to be useful they need to be normalized. That means only one tag should be used for every post that has that tag. You can’t have “RPG, D&D and rpg” used to describe posts on role playing games. Those are all different tags and if you looked for RPG tagged items, you miss the ones with the rpg tag.

Well using categories as tags fixes this because all tags have to be previously defined. So they are consistently applied.

So I’m back to the way it was before. And I like it and think it works.