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February 19th, 2009 | Posted in Blogging, WordPress 5 Comments »
This rotating flash tag cloud provides a curious approach to tags, no doubt more novel than useful, but still interesting and somewhat worthwhile. The flash cloud shows only 80 tags (any more and it’s unreadable).
My rotating WordPress tag cloud (click to view the flash version)
For a comprehensive list of site tags, see my tag index. Both arrangements lack usability. I’m never quite sure what to do with tags. My approach has been to treat them like index keywords, so I often tag each post with a handful of freeform tags that come to mind.
However you approach the organization of your content, making 697 posts (the number of posts on my blog) findable on a website that people don’t spend more than 5 minutes browsing is a formidable challenge. Common organization schemes, beyond tag clouds (whether “cumulus” or flat, list or other), include category lists, date-based archives, related posts, random posts, most popular posts, most popular posts by category, indexes, category indexes, top 10, article series links, manual arrangements of links, and a search box.
Despite all of these methods, none seems to be especially compelling. Ninety percent of users arrive at the from search or feed, scan the posts on the home page, perhaps the related links on the post they landed on, and then click away. They see less than 5% of the total site content. What do you feel is the best method for organizing blog content?
Tags: findability, Flash, organization, tag cloud
On my family site, my husband and I use categories for high-level organization. Then we use tags as a secondary level. Our blog is still new though, so I’m not sure how well this will work out as our content grows. But I think establishing categories (even if they are kind of general) keeps us focused on what topics we want our blog to be about.
I struggle with how to best use categories and tags, but mostly tags. Like you, I have thought of them as indexing keywords. But over time, I’ve found that this doesn’t work as nicely as I thought closer to the beginning. In fact, as I’m out reading everyone else’s blog, I’m looking for a solution, a strategy for using categories and tags, that really works. Does anyone have a great example or two? I’m eager to learn from someone who has figured it out.
i found modify cloud, do you know where can i get the source code of this cloud here: http://qna.info.pl ?? thanks
Hey, The link to the cloud doesn’t work…
Sorry, I ended up disabling this because it was another plugin on my site that had little value. Once you start piling up the plugins, your site loads more slowly. This one had little value for me. I need to go back and update this post.