Tags, categories — seem crippled

  • gwideman · Member ·

    … but maybe I missed something?

    If a reader is reading a post of mine which I’ve tagged “xyz”, how do they find other posts that I’ve marked with the same tag?

    I see that if a reader clicks on the tags appearing beneath the post, then what they get is a WordPress.com search listing of posts from *all* blogs on wordpress.com having tag “xyz” — NOT just posts on my site.

    This makes them virtually useless for organizing information *within* a site. (Unless, as I am hoping, there’s some setting that can be changed on this.)

    I now see that the below-post category links have the same problem.

    So — is there any way to find same-tagged or same-category posts just on my site?

    Further — have I missed some way to turn on tags or categories for Pages?

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • raincoaster · Member ·

    You put the category widget in the sidebar.

  • panaghiotisadam · Member ·

    And the tag cloud widget.

    Pages cannot be tagged or categorized.

  • gwideman · Member ·

    Thanks for your replies, but they’re only partly related to the question.

    If a reader is already seeing a page tagged a particular way, then the obvious thing to provide is “show me more like this by the same author”, and NOT:

    — show me more by anybody in the universe who happens to have used the same tag, or
    — make me hunt through dozens of unorganized tags in a cloud or category list

    Neither the category widget nor the tag cloud are practical ways to get “more like this”, especially for more than a small number of tags or categories.

    The existing default under-post links are basically a bug. When I tag something with “tips”, I’m referring to “tips” *within my context* — I’m not referring to heads of arrows, extra payments to waiters or the like, and to send readers off on that wild goose chase is incorrect.

  • ellaella · Member ·

    It only takes a few moments to achieve that by hand, linking to your category archive. Let’s pretend your Windows cat has a lot of posts. At the end of a new post you could write something like

    See my Windows Archive for <a href=http://grahamwideman.wordpress.com/category/windows/>earlier information.</a> about this

  • panaghiotisadam · Member ·

    @gwideman:

    – It seems you’re only thinking of the organization of your blog, forgetting the other function of tags and categories: attracting visitors via search engines.

    – Categories and tags in your sidebar lead to your posts, while categories and tags under/over a post lead to the global wp pages. That’s the way it’s designed: you may very well not agree with it (and you’re not alone!), but that doesn’t make it a bug.

    – If you’d like something changed, you can submit that suggestion (to staff) in the Ideas section of the forum.

    – My complaint re tags and categories happens to be that the tag-cloud widget offers no options (while the category-cloud widget does), and that categories cannot be arranged in sections (while links can).

    – And a note re your use of tags: tags and categories work in exactly the same way, so there’s no point in using the same word in a post as both a category and a tag.

  • gwideman · Member ·

    Thanks for the new replies folks.

    ellaella: Right, that’s obviously a possibility — somewhat tedious for multi tags, and rather highlights the current problems with tags/categories. (And see my final comment below)

    panaghiotisadam: I’m well aware of the purported attracting function of tags/categories, but I don’t put much faith in it, since tags are usually short and, in a global context, too vague to be useful. Compared to that I think it more important to have tags (a) make sense within the context of my topics, and (b) let users navigate within my context.

    Yep, I’m considering proposing to staff that the below-post tag links work locally, and that there be a separate feature to follow tags to other blogs, if it’s important to wp.com’s business model.

    I very much agree with you on incomplete implementation tag clouds and category organization.

    And — yes, I am not currently using tags and categories in a sensible way, as I was just stumbling through learning their individual idiosyncracies which are currently driving how one might use them, rather than a coherent design of their feature sets. Tags and cats are different in that, as you mentioned, there are different widgets to work with them.

    Finally, my current conclusion is that the optimum way to use tags or categories is to suffix each one with an additional string unique to one’s own blog, thereby causing the below-post links to do something sensible.

    ie: my “linux” tag becomes “linux[gw]” and so on.

  • panaghiotisadam · Member ·

    Maybe another possibility to limit the problem is abandoning tags altogether. You can use categories with multiple subcategories instead. I think the categories widget is neat; the tag cloud, on the contrary, looks terrible to me – and it won’t display all your tags anyway.

  • 1tess · Moderator Emeritus ·

    panos,
    A quick question, if you know the answer (though I could experiment myself if you don’t):
    Will the categories widget display all categories, no matter how many?

  • panaghiotisadam · Member ·

    Yes. I’ve seen blogs with hundreds of categories. Check raincoaster’s, for instance: she’s got more than 300. Then check THIS!

  • 1tess · Moderator Emeritus ·

    Thank you.
    As complicated as I can make things, 2300 is even beyond me!
    I must define what I want to do w/blog more clearly.

  • gwideman · Member ·

    raincoaster, panaghiotisadam: I’ve just looked at raincoaster’s site, and see that the means of handling 300+ catagories is using a combobox for the category list with “SelectCategory” as the default item.

    However took me a while to *find* the category list, so…comment to raincoaster — that combobox list is too wide to fit the sidebar (possibly due to the long category string “Professor raincoaster’s little lectures”), and consequently the usual drop-down arrow (on the right) is hidden — so there’s no cue that it’s a drop-down list — it just looks like an oddly-formatted heading for a section with no items.

    Further, the default item is not findable by browser find. And the title of the Category widget appears as just “a”.

    All of these make it hard to notice that there *is* a category list unless one is sure that it’s there somewhere. Needless to say, I suggest to raincoaster to make it a bit more prominent so as to get better advantage from it.

    (As I’ve noted previously, the Categories widget doesn’t answer my objections regarding the under-post links, but it’s nonetheless potentially a useful widget.)

  • gwideman · Member ·

    FWIW — I did contact support. Continued here:
    https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/better-tagcategory-links-behavior?replies=1#post-316528

  • ayundabhuwana · Member ·

    Anyway, I want to ask a simple question, what is the difference between tags and category? And why can’t we put a category or tag to a page? Thanks

  • thesacredpath · Member ·

    Categories and tags are treated the same by wordpress and by the search engines. You can think of categories as broad descriptions Example: Restaurants.

    Tags you can think of as subcategories. Example: Mexican, Italian, Thai, etc.

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