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March 15, 2007
Web Site News - The Amazing Tag Cloud Page
For the past few weeks, we have been using Movable Type tags instead of categories to organize our posts. This has required a major conversion effort that is still ongoing.
Tags and categories are both submitted to Technorati for the purpose of organizing blog posts by topic. Movable Type did not support tags when we started doing this, so we had a huge list of categories we had created to identify different aspects of a post's topic. This caused some performance problems which forced us to only put recent posts on our category pages, and that in turn made certain types of Google searching unreliable: Google would have indexed some text that had been on the page a few weeks ago but was now gone.
Anyway, it was a bad scheme, so we had to get rid of it. The conversion requires manually updating the tag information for all of our posts. So far this has been done for everything except March 2005 through June 2006. It takes about two minutes to convert a post, but Bruce keeps passing out after every few hours, and he also periodically has to put some time in on his day job, so the process is very slow. In the meantime, you can see all the tags and how they rank on our Tag Cloud page.
The Tag Cloud shows all the tags. The size and color of the tag name indicates how many posts are associated with it. So far, it seems pretty clear that humor (455 posts) is more prevalent on this blog than conservatism (420 posts), and mozzarella cheese (21 posts) is more important than Nancy Pelosi (14 posts). This makes sense to me.
Anyway, my hope is that this system makes it easier to find stuff on this blog. I am continually worried that there aren't enough people taking my advice, and this is just one more way I'm working Bruce to the bone to make it easier for you to find out what I'm thinking.
Respectfully submitted,
Ferdinand T. Cat
# At Thu 2:04 AM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (0) | More Web Site News | Tags: blogging Google search engine tags Technorati
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