ten billion butterfly sneezes

Ever since WordPress introduced native support for tags, I’ve struggled with getting a decent tagging system in place here at tbbs.

The struggle has been compounded by a well-intentioned, though not well-executed effort to convert my existing categories to tags. Some categories, most significantly my punchlines and RIP categories, translated nicely to tags. Others; e.g., the Life category, turned into a Fibber McGee’s closet of posts, some of which may even be categorized accurately as Life.

Add to the foregoing that I use a variety of blog clients: ecto, ScribeFire, and the WP admin panel itself. This precipitated the installation of an array of plugins whose functions were to expand specially-delimited strings in the post body into tags when the post was displayed. Yet another plugin performed the same function, but for Technorati tags.

Somewhere along the line, the plugins got into a state of mortal conflict, tags weren’t updating properly or at all, and I’m exploding into a blazing fireball of mixed tags, wrong tags, or no tags.

Enough already. Here’s the remedy:

1. Switch to ScribeFire exclusively for posting. It supports tags, both locally, and Technorati. I rarely use the Mac for blog posting anymore anyhow, so this isn’t much of a change.
2. Convert all existing categories to tags. Ham-fisted, yes, and the tag cloud will be skewed for a while. You have to break some eggs to make an omelet.
3. Strip out all the delimited tag strings from existing posts.
4. Disable and deinstall the plugins that made (3) above work.

So, if things look a little more dishevelled than normal around here for a while, that’s what’s going on.

Pardon my dust, etc, etc.

-k-