• Tags and categories

    by  • Sunday 18 May 2008 • Uncategorized • 1 Comment

    I have been remodelling my web page today, installing the latest version of WordPress, and testing out a new theme and organisational structure. I have been using categories for a while in my blog, but have not used the tags feature because I didn’t really understand the difference before I read this:

    Categories can be tags, sure, but not all categories are tags, and not all tags should be categories. I think of categories as a table of contents and tags as the index page of a book. If I’m searching for a broad topic, unsure of exactly what I need to find or the keywords, then I will hit the table of contents (categories). If I know the exact word I need in order to find the information I want, then I will hit the index page (tags).

    This seems reasonable, and I will start to use tags and categories differently from now on.

    About

    Alexander Refsum Jensenius is a music researcher and research musician living in Oslo, Norway.

    http://www.arj.no

    One Response to Tags and categories

    1. Wednesday 21 May 2008 at 15:15

      I tend to think of categories as being exclusive, and tags as being inclusive. I prefer tags because they much better represent the multifaceted nature of most content.

    Leave a Reply

    Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *