So I’ve been experimenting with WordPress’s new built-in “tags” feature. It’s pretty neat, but it’s not 100% awesome.
For one thing, I’ve got nearly 1,000 posts on this blog so far. Going back and trying to add tags to existing posts is a PAIN IN THE ASS.
Secondly, I find that often the tags I would associate with a post are just the names of the categories I’ll be posting in - so what’s the point? And when you get down to it, tags are basically just categories on crack.
Thirdly, it can be hard to think up tags. I’m not good at it. I have put a lot of tags in back-articles; I’m sure I could have chosen better tags for lots of things. And I’m sure I’ll continue to choose bad tags that only confuse people. Le sigh.
Finally, and this isn’t really a jab at the tagging system itself, but the tag widget I use will completely crap itself if you set the minimum and maximum font sizes to be exactly the same. I thought I would set them to be the same so all the tag links were the same size (I’m not sure I like the different sized items in the “tag cloud” idea), but when I did, I got all sorts of “division by zero” errors on the page and I had to switch it back. Not a big deal, really, but still.
So, I will continue to experiment with tags as time goes by. I’ll let you know how it goes.
I direct your attention to a recent post of mine. A look at it from the main page shows “Comments (3)”, but when you actually look at the comments, there are only 2.
Looking at the WordPress admin panel shows the same thing. It thinks there are 3 comments, but there are only 2. What’s going on?
I’ve looked into the issue a little bit, and found a few things:
- Some people have this problem because they manually delete comments. (I don’t; I use Akismet and the built-in WordPress tools to moderate comments.)
- Some people reported the problem, but they are all hosted on the WordPress.com site (I obviously am not; I’m self-hosted here at starkeith.net.)
- I’ve read claims that the bug is fixed. I’m running the most recent version of WordPress - so why is it still happening?
Anyone care to comment on this one? I’m stumped!
So, new versions of WordPress support “tags.” Which seem like an interesting way to categorize things - and handy, too. I’ve been able to go back and categorize all my posts on “REAL ID” with a tag so they can be quickly found. Although tagging is not 100% awesome - there are some quirks to it. And I’m still figuring them out, so bear with me - you may see my “tag cloud” on the sidebar change suddenly.
Once again, I have changed the theme of this blog… in terms of the visual style, anyway.
If you’ve seen some of the pictures in my Flickr sidebar lately, you would notice that I’ve got sort of a “red” theme going on in my office. Well, now my blog matches my office.
Is that wrong?
I’ve modified the theme a bit, of course. I’m a strong believer in having links be underlined… something that some people don’t do, in the name of style. I understand, of course, but I still think links should be underlined, so I hack any template I use to underline links. And to make sure that visited links have a different (and recognizable) color variation from unvisited links. Let’s just say I’ve read a thing or two on web usability and leave it at that.
Still, I like it. I think I’ll keep this one around for a while.
My post yesterday about older games seems to have attracted some attention - but in this case, of the negative kind. This morning I logged on to find a bunch of new comments - except they all looked somehow… odd. Turns out they were all from throw-away blogs (fake blogs set up to increase search engine rankings) that had done a “trackback” to my article. Some of them quoted just a bit of it (to make it relevant in Google’s eyes, I suppose) and one even went so far as to try and look like a legitimate link - except they used the wrong name! (They said “I’d have to agree with this post by Kevin B.”)
Very strange - and this is the first time I’ve seen stuff like this show up in the comments. Has anyone else ever seen such comment spam? Is this a new phenominon, or is it just old stuff that I have been lucky enough to avoid thus far?
Keithius | November 20, 2007
