@scottstephens It's WordPress, although I'm in the process of moving to Micro.blog hosting. I wrote a guide here with a bunch of tips for WordPress.
@manton ooh, interesting! Moving to Micro.blog hosting should give you insights into how others are using the platform. I’m planning on signing my wife up for a hosted account this week!
@scottstephens In addition to Manton’s guide in the official help, @chrisreed and @PhoneBoy both have good tutorials on their blogs (I don't have the URLs in front of me because I'm on the phone ATM).
@scottstephens It turns out after categorizing posts for 16 years, I'm not convinced that's such an important feature anymore. We'll likely have some form of categories or tags eventually, though.
@manton I like tags, both automatically extracted from hashtags in the post or added separately, but haven't found a need for categories. I've been tagging my posts for years, and now have fun tag pages like https://aaronparecki.com/tag/microblog
@scottstephens That's good to know, thanks. Perhaps I underestimate how often they are used. (I think usually someone visits the home page, or finds an individual blog post from a search or link.)
@manton depending on blog entry you might be interested in related posts, where a category or a tag set becomes useful. But really, what’s the difference between tags and categories? Aren’t categories really just a set of “tags” that you choose to display/list?
@JohnPhilpin same here, categories always seemed like specialized tags to me. Interesting way of thinking about it. To me, both would be tags. “notebooks” is a generic one, the others more specific. They could also be in hierarchy, so applying “Moleskine” would imply “notebooks”. The site as general would list “notebooks” in the sidebar or something (if that was the theme).
@oyam get you - to me tags may or may not be related to your theme - categories are .. tags are just interesting random things that connect - categories and sub categories likely follow a formal structure
@oyam I'm with @JohnPhilpin. On my site the categories are labelled Subjects which are the broad sets of ideas I am writing about; tags represent the specifics within the individual post.
@simonmumbles @oyam ... ‘the specifics in an individual post’ ... nicely summarized - what I have been trying to say ... not neccesarily blog wide - I have loads of tags that have only been used once - but I get reminded of them when I add tags ...
@simonmumbles @JohnPhilpin Isn’t that just a semantic difference, though? This is why I struggle with this difference. Isn’t the list of Subjects on your site just a specific subset of tags? On your main page you just list this subset, rather than all tags. I see it as two different systems to do one thing: group your posts based on some relation.
@cleverdevil Exactly, it's really important to use the hosting even more than I already do. (Hi @cleverangel! Welcome.)
@oyam it is - but then it isn’t - at least in my humble opinion - if I have written something but I can’t categorize it in one of my one defined categories ... then I need to ask does this blog post really fit here - but I can always find tags ... that all said - Good search is so good that I am starting to think whether I should kill all categories anyway - tag clouds however - I find interesting ... and if I could run a single tag cloud across all my blogs - oh my
@JohnPhilpin That makes sense. I guess it comes down to discipline and how much you write. When I write something it’s either to cover a specific topic (which will specifically fall under one of my “category tags” for a lack of better term). I’m also not much of a writer, so I don’t have the problem of having extra post that may be off topic. Hopefully that’ll change one day...
@oyam Yep, as @JohnPhilpin said re: making it fit to your own model. I understand that all tags is preferable -- certainly less work -- but my current goals for my site involve the hierarchy that suits having two (at least seemingly) separate sets of tag types. This gets hazy quickly but overall I'd say it mostly comes down to how your writing fits into your overall creative habits, which are likely to change over time anyway.
Maybe I'll end up mostly writing elsewhere and then reduce the set-up down to just tags. Hopefully that means I'm getting paid by the aforementioned elsewhere, heh.
@simonmumbles @oyam ... ‘paid for writing’ ... you don’t read that much anymore - one of my favorites on THAT topic
@simonmumbles @JohnPhilpin I don't mean to to stir things up again, but... :) This Macdrifter article resonated with me, specifically the linked post about the Zettelkasten system, probably because that's how my brain works. Whether you like or use categories, or not, I figured the article (and links) may be of interest.
Not trying to start a war here or convert anyone! Just genuinely thought it was interesting, as I've only recently started contemplating this and looking at the differences. Although, having re-read this thread again, I guess I now know which way I'm leaning...
@oyam nice article and actually not out of wack with how I think - categories reflect a pre determined structure tags are random and generated on an as needed basis ....
ThAts how I see it and how I work
@JohnPhilpin I finally got around to watching that. Whilst I am totally on board with the core concept, it's safe to say that Elllison wouldn't know how to effectively communicate an idea if he was trained for a 100 years to do so.
@oyam @JohnPhilpin That's a good article. I found the most important part to be about knowing your project well enough, which is obviously specific to each person's way of working and exactly at what in the project's life are they at.
Even in the past two weeks since I last replied I've thought about using tags/tags and categories purely for myself, as an internal system and then linking to them in a different way than I currently have; for example, remove the widget and independently link to the tag/category in the relevant space -- that could be within a post, page, externally for sharing, etc.