Turning Wordpress into a tag-based blogging application - Jarrod Trainque

"Summary: How to forego categories and date-based archives and turn your Wordpress-powered blog into a tag-based blogging system. Like del.icio.us, but a blog.

Like most bloggers, I don’t get a ton of front-page traffic. My visitor logs show that most of my visitors come via google, and land on a specific page. Given the behavior of my user base, I got thinking about how Wordpress is structured, and decided that the content I post on this blog isn’t optimized for my users.

First, understand that most blogs are sorted in time. The most recent articles appear on the front page, with the newest posts at the top. This makes perfect sense for blogs that are timely (newsblogs, for example) and are centered around a specific topic.

However, I’m not reporting news-type items, and this blog is not centered around a specific topic. I also update this rather inconsitently, sometimes going days without posting and sometimes posting many items a day. Really what I’m doing is creating individual pages first, and using the front page to organize the most recent posts instead of primarily publishing directly to the front page.

What I did this past weekend was modify my Wordpress installation so that posts could be tagged with keywords. This will enable users to navigate from one topic to another or stay within a given topic more easily."