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Today, I had a few hours to spare, so I bit the bullet and upgraded WordPress to version 2.3.1, which brings me, your humble scribe and site administrator, a few benefits (and also hopefully a few less security holes, etc.). The main benefits being native tag support and an inbuilt editor that now works with Safari and not just IE. As the server is running gentoo it was a matter of typing a couple of lines into the bash shell and the upgrade was almost done… a quick visit into the admin pages to upgrade the database, and the site was up again. When I need to make a few behind the scenes tweaks, with 2.3 I can now use the Maintenance Mode plugin, so this was installed and activated whilst I did things like import the article tags from Ultimate Tag Warrior so that they are now managed by the native engine, and upgraded the theme from Copperleaf Plus 1.18 to Fluid Blue. I hope everybody likes the new theme and layout. I have tried to keep the layout nice and clean, and the first page has been greatly simplified.

Since my initial post on BX (Improving The Blogging Experience), more blood, sweat, and tears have been expended in this effort. The result of this toil is a new look to this site/blog/whatever, and the introduction of tagging to posts and tag clouds to represent the organization of posts based on their new aforementioned tags.

The most obvious change has been at the presentation layer, which is based upon the Copperleaf Plus Theme, but with a few of my own tweaks and changes. I hope you like what I’ve done with it.

The second change is to install the Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW), a plugin for WordPress (which is the engine behind this site/blog/whatever). UTW allows posts to be assigned to tags, and then various visual representations to be constructed based on the tags that have been applied.

The idea behind tags and tagging is to allow another layer of classification to be applied to posts, over and above the existing method of assigning them to categories. Each post can now have one or more tags assigned to it, and posts can then be retrieved based on what tags they contain. The most graphically stunning way of doing this is through a ‘tag cloud’ (in the sidebar), which is a list of the (50 most popular) tags, sorted alphabetically, but with the size of the type indicating the rank of the tag based on its frequency within the set of all tags. This weighted list representation provides an interesting way of seeing what tags are the ‘hottest’ in the group.

When viewing a post the list of tags are shown, and you can click on these to search for other posts with the same tag, which is a good way to explore related posts.

The ability to search based on tags (in addition to the existing full text search facility) will be implemented in the near future.

For a great post which discusses category vs. tag based blogs, read Turning WordPress into a tag-based blogging application.