Posted by: fmclean in blogging
Lost links and confusion
I mentioned in my last post that I had been playing around with the theme for my blog and adding tags to posts, this has now lead to another job of updating links. As I was trying different themes I found that I had two many pages and some of the names were too long and disrupted the flow of the theme. So to solve this I copied all the text from the Glossary page and added it to the Info page and changed the page named 31 Day Chocolate Challenge to Challenges. Then as I was adding tags and changing categories I found links to these pages and had to update the changes. So I was lucky that I changed the names and flow of the blog at the same time as I was opening each post to add tags etc.
A while back I decided I wanted to be consistent in the username I used online and so changed my twitter name to developit, of course through my blog I mentioned twitter and provided a link to “me” , this was another link to update. I also added MyBlogLog in the sidebar. I had not visited MyBlogLog in a while so before I could add it to the sidebar I needed to update all my Services so that had correct usernames. So hopefully that is it and links will all work within my site, this is not true if others have links to these pages but I suppose that is just the nature of the web.
Sometimes it is hard to remember what links I have within posts to other posts but after this exercise I will be more aware of checking links, I suppose link checking should be something to do occasionally just as I do on other websites that I manage but not something I had thought of in relation to my blog.
So my conclusion from these exercises is the same as when I clean and tidy my house, often it is harder to find things when they have been put away properly, when you start cleaning one things then everything else needs doing, but in the long run it is nice to walk into the house (blog dashboard) and see everything in its place. 
Tags:
Categories,
Cleaning,
Links,
Tags,
Twitter
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Posted by: fmclean in blogging
Clean out and Organise Blog
Last night I started playing around with the available themes for my blog, this is fun but also a big time waster. While in the dashboard I thought I would add a tag cloud to the site but as I soon discovered none of my posts had tags. All my posts had multiple categories but no tags, so today the long task started to add tags and change the categories that I had added to each of the posts.
Well this was a very slow process. If anyone knows how I can assign one tag to a group of posts after they have been published please let me know. I had to open each one, add the tags and then save. Then of course after I had done this I realised that I should probably have taken some of the selected categories off the posts, it would have been easier if I had thought of this as I was adding tags as I could have done it all at the same time.
There seems to be much confusing about Tags and Categories. My limited understanding on Tags vs Categories is that Categories should be thought of as the chapters in a book and tags are keywords like a book index. Tags can be displayed on a blog as a Tag cloud, the more posts that have the same tag the bigger the word appears in the cloud. A post will often only be under one category but have multiple tags. There are a lot more specifics about being able to search tags etc that I wont go into but it gets quiet complicated and everyone seems to have an opinion about how to use them properly, just Google tags vs categories and you will see.
At the end of all this I still do not have all my tags and categories sorted out yet, I need to spend some more time defining my category list as this is large and was originally used like a tag system. So once I have this sorted I can start my next challenge I have set myself to complete the 7 Days to Rediscovering Your Blogging Groove and I still have to do my 7 Things You Don’t Need to Know About Me as I was tagged by Sue Hickton that also means I need to find 7 other people to tag so be warned.
Tags:
Categories,
Challenges,
Tags
1 Comment »
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