I’m willing to recant a “previous statement”:http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2007/01/21/ultimate-tag-warrior-latest-update/#comment-164977 and admit when I’m wrong. I’ve been avoiding using any kind of tagging plugin for this blog because I’ve always felt that tags were somewhat pointless and created a lot of unnecessary clutter. Most of the tagging I’d seen were links to Technorati, and I couldn’t justify leaving a bunch of those lying around with no good reason. I know that doing so would likely have generated some more traffic to my site, but for me that wasn’t good enough reason to use something that like.
Lorelle was kind enough, though, to “put tagging into perspective”:http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2007/01/21/ultimate-tag-warrior-latest-update/#comment-165326 for me – she views categories as your site’s table of contents and tagging as your site’s index. That notion has stuck in my mind for the last couple of weeks, and I’ve had to admit that that approach has a certain kind of appeal to it. So, I’ve decided to give Ultimate Tag Warrior a chance, setting it up on my test blog yesterday and figuring out how to install, configure, and integrate it into my current template. The only downside is that I now have 3.5 years of entries (numbering 720 total) that now need to be indexed – a daunting task, but one that should make things around here a little easier to find. I’m also now using Technorati tags, but you won’t know it since I’m keeping them invisible (and already I’ve seen a little extra traffic coming my way from Technorati).
I’ve also used the Category Converter plugin to merge some of my categories into more general topics, leaving the tags to make things more specific.
And if anyone uses the Navigation 1.0 theme for WordPress and would like the modified files to integrate UTW into their own site, let me know so I can bundle them up and make them available. It took me a few minutes to rework the files and shuffle some code around to make everything look right.
I’ll do a more comprehensive writeup soon and detail what I like about this plugin – and all the others I use – and what I don’t like.
Sure. Make me consider a topic I’ve never given a moment’s thought before. But Lorelle’s explanation makes too much sense.
I have nearly four years of entries and over 1000 posts to evaluate if I should decide to implement this. It’s all your fault, Jim. ;)
I know – I’m terrible. But blame it on Lorelle. After all, _she’s_ the one that got _me_ started on this idea. ;-)
Hi,
Can you give me any help on using ultimate tag warrior with bbpress and blues and sands theme? I am not sure how to install the plugin?
re: mary – Mary, for starters, there’s no need to use UTW with bbPress, as the code already has a native tagging ability built in. If you’re looking to install UTW with WordPress, I’d recommend upgrading to WordPress 2.3.3, which also now has tagging built in. At this point UTW has outlived its usefulness. :)