For visitors from 43 Folders exploring Tagamac for the first time, welcome! you might want to check out Tagging best practices (the site’s most popular article to date), Easy choices (a short counterpoint to some of the thoughts from the 43 Folders article and my previous “The what” article), or the software reviews. There is also a list of the most popular articles in the archives.

Well, sort of. Unfortunately, WordPress 2.3 is very bare bones when it comes to tags. No auto-completion. No cloud underneath your editing window. You have to either remember all of your tags, or just go for broke with the random method.

Thankfully there are, as always, plugins to make WordPress behave the way you want. Two that I highly recommend are Tag Managing Thing from the creator of the Ultimate Tag Warrior and Recommended Tags.

Tag Managing Thing does pretty much what it says, and not only allows you to manage tags but also categories. Very useful for changing names and slugs, merging, splitting, or otherwise manipulating your metadata.

Recommended Tags brings auto-completion, recommended tags based on some Javascript voodoo, and a list of all tags in the site to easily add tags to posts. You can choose the functionality that you want to show up on your posts page, making it even more useful and friendly.

Also, if you’re updating to 2.3 don’t miss the overlooked tag template tags is_tag() &emdash; a conditional function &emdash; and single_tag_title() &emdash; a function that’s very useful for tag archive pages.

I’m glad that my favorite blogging platform has finally implemented tags, although I wonder how truly useful it will be for people. Particularly in blogging tags often end up being superfluous; I think it’s because a blog’s tags are not collaborative, but often bloggers don’t have any experience tagging outside of collaborative systems and don’t really bother to think about whether they are using tags in a useful fashion.

Which actually makes me curious; do you, my gentle readers, find Tagamac’s tags useful? If you do (or don’t), please tell me about it. I know that when I’m trying to find old articles on Tagamac I often use the tags, which seems hopeful, but I’d be very interested to hear if they’re at all helpful to other people.

Plus if I get enough feedback perhaps I’ll be able to offer some informed opinions to the new-to-tagging WordPress crowd (instead of just opinions). Everyone and their mother seems to be sharing advice on how to implement tags into themes, but no one seems to be thinking about how best to tag a blog.

I’ve got a number of articles in various stages of draft, though, so once the review is out the door you can look forward to more interesting reading than a stream of version numbers and summarized release notes.

Why Ma.gnolia? Because visiting del.icio.us is like getting slapped in the face by the color blue. This is my first venture into the world of social bookmarking, and I’d rather see pretty flowers than try the site that started it all.

Using Tagamac

1. Browsing Tagamac
2. Have it your way

Like tagging, but uninterested in Mac software updates? Like software updates, but hate my opinions/advice on tagging? Only interested in software reviews? We’ve got you covered!

Tagamac offers custom feeds for every section of the site, allowing you to subscribe only to what you want to read. You can choose your preferred subscription from our RSS info page, or use the following links to subscribe to the main sections that were available at the time of this writing.

• General
• Reviews
• Site news
• Software updates

If I ever add a section that you want to subscribe to, simply navigate to the section using the links in the sidebar or archives and add “feed/” to the end of the location in your address bar (so it looks like this: “http://tagamac.com/archives/categoryname/feed/”). Enjoy your customized RSS feed!

However, that also means that I won’t be able to update Tagamac for the next week, and will be horribly remiss if you contact me. I’ve scheduled a couple articles to auto-post, though, so hopefully you won’t be too bereft. I’ll be back actively posting and writing in a few days!

Tagamac now features full text RSS articles. Of course, RSS articles will have ugly formatted images (until/unless I can create a WordPress plugin that inserts inline styles) and if the article falls in a series it won’t include the table of contents, but those hard-core types who never want to leave their RSS reader should now be a bit happier (okay, admittedly I’m one of them). Apologies to all subscribers for taking this long to notice the problem.

Using Tagamac

1. Browsing Tagamac
2. Have it your way

I’ve tried to make Tagamac as simple as possible to navigate, but given that it is a blog content tends to get recycled into the dreaded archives fairly quickly. Hopefully with the following tips and tricks, you’ll find it easy to locate that article that was so helpful in the past that you want to reread.

Although I love lists of three, there’s actually four different features of Tagamac that will hopefully make your life easier when it comes to finding content: the searchbar, sections, tags, and series.

If you are looking for a specific article and you remember what it was about, your best bet is to use the searchbar, located at the top of each page. The search isn’t always the most accurate in the world, but it’s the quickest way to find a specific article. The searchbar will even search static pages, such as my Intro to tags or software list.

If you aren’t looking for something specific, then you might be best off browsing the different sections of the site. Like the main page, they contain the ten most recent posts, but if you only want to see, say, news about software updates then the sections can be very useful. Section links are located in the sidebar, the archives, and at the end of every article next to the date the article was published.

If you are looking for specific topic, such as general advice about tagging, then the site’s tag cloud is a good place to look. There you can browse all articles that match a specific tag, and since most of the tags I use for articles represent discrete topics, you’ll likely get the kind of articles you’re looking for. The tag cloud is linked in the sidebar, or specific tags are attached to the end of every article.

I also group related articles into series. If an article is in a series, you’ll find a table of contents on the article’s permalink page and links at the bottom to navigate to the next and previous articles in the series. For instance, this article is in the “Using Tagamac” series, so you’ll find a table of contents at the top of the page. I link to most of the main series on the site on the Intro to tags page.

Additionally, although it’s almost not worth mentioning, you can use the monthly archive, available via the archives. The monthly archives are exactly like the main page, only sorted by month. If you just want to browse without any purpose, they are your best bet.

My goal is to keep all the terms I use either immediately obvious or simple enough that someone who has no experience with tagging can pick them up easily. Regardless of whether I achieve that goal, I figure a glossary for reference can never hurt. Plus it makes me feel so important (“I have my own glossary! Whoopee! Who needs grad school, anyway?”).

You can look forward to updates on all of the Mac software that uses tags (that I’ve found, anyway), reviews of Mac tagging software, and general information about tagging that will hopefully be useful even for those who do not use tags on the Mac.

Although this may seem odd, at least at first I will not be discussing tags as an internet phenomenon. Tags may have gained their primary impetus through collaborative online spaces, but I have found that at least for me, the intrigue and the challenge of tags is less how I can use them online (which generally is fairly straight-forward) and more about how I can integrate them into the organization on my computer. Perhaps I will begin to look at tags online more in the future, but for now Tagamac is just like its name sounds: tagging on the Mac.

I hope you enjoy! The easiest way to read Tagamac is to subscribe via RSS (link at the top of the page). If you aren’t sure what RSS is all about, please read about RSS, including recommendations for RSS software. Also, I would love to hear your feedback on the site, the content, the design, or what you had for breakfast today. Please think about contacting me.