Ever since I learned about the possibilities with combining categories and tags for blog posts, I have been eager to implement tags on my blog. The idea is that you have fewer categories, but more tags. The two-level taxonomy is supposed to give you more flexibility and avoid a long, long category list on your blog page. Definitely a good thing in my opinion!

To get these tags for my blog posts, I wanted to add the Ultimate Tag Warrior plug-in to this blog. There was no version for the WordPress 2.1 that I had installed, and when things didn’t seem to work after just 15 seconds (the amount of time I allocated to the task!), I set the tweaking aside for a rainy day. Then I got a bad cold. Then work happened. And then I heard about WordPress 2.2 – with tags – coming out soon, but slightly delayed. At that point, I decided to wait. I am not nerdy enough (read “don’t have time!”) to bother with the UTW configuration only to have to upgrade and perhaps throw out that hard work just a few weeks later. I am quite happy to wait a few more weeks for 2.2.

In the meantime, I could satisfy my urge to tag with Thunderbird 2.0.0.0 when I upgraded to that version this week. The feature called labels is gone, obviously replaced by tags. Instead of having only Important, To Do, Personal, Work, and Later as your only labeling options, you can now add your own tags! And they are so easy to add. This looks like an opportunity to really gain control of my inbox! Oh joy! A heartfelt thanks to all those hard workers in the Thunderbird community who built this free mail program and added tags.

As a newbie blogger, I find it all quite exciting. You can see pictures over on Lisa Risager’s blog. There is no specific agenda. People are just chatting with old friends. Others have put sticky notes on their laptops to indicate what topics interest them. It’s great to walk around and read these topics. Someone is converting from another system to WordPress, but I can’t help there, so I move on. I met two newbies who suddenly made me feel experienced with my two-month-old blog. I could even show one of them something about themes, which made me feel that I was finally a contributor, and not just a taker.

What have I learned?

Well, I was puzzled about the difference between trackbacks and pingbacks. Very nice Philip from blogbar.dk gave me some helpful advice. Pingbacks are automatic, and probably favored by those types who think spamming is cool. Naturally, some choose to block pingbacks in the hopes of avoiding extra channels for spam to their site. Trackbacks require someone to copy and paste the URL for a post, so there is a lower risk of spam coming in that way. So, I will not bother with pingbacks. Not that I have, but now I have no interest in them.

I can see that my theme has an update, and I was bit nervous about that. I don’t mind testing things, but not if you end up with loads of cleaning, fixing, and tweaking. “Theme” Thomas is here so I could quickly ask a few questions about that. Basically, I should just upload the new theme, and if there are problems, I can just go back to the previous level. In other words, now I am not so scared to work with themes. (If you are experienced with blogs or WordPress and laughing at my nervousness now – don’t forget – you were once a newbie!)

I was impressed with Lisa’s pictures on her site, which I have already referenced. Her blog entry was so simple. She just made a link and inset the references to thumbnails of her pictures. Couldn’t be easier. She uses 23hq, which is a Danish site for photo sharing. I haven’t starting taking pictures and uploading them to that type of site, but it sounds quite smart. She doesn’t have to do any editing. 23hq does it all. She uploads one picture and all res-sizing is taken care of by the site.

There are so many aspects to blogging tools. You can start blogging from the moment you install your WordPress blog, but getting to know it well can keep you busy for quite some time. I had never realized that I could edit features of my theme until today. Eureka! This is located under Presentations in the administration panel. Smart!

When I go home, I want to download Widgets from Automattic. “Theme” Thomas demonstrated that. It looks quite interesting. It provides a means to edit your sidebar without going into your WordPress php files. Basically making your life easier so you can get on with writing.

Well, I think I’ll go and wander around a bit more and see what else I can learn.

From the Accessify.com blog, I learned that Mark Pilgrim made a nice extension to Firefox so you can tab to your bookmark toolbar. Very nice.

I am still not fluent in all the commands and other mouse-avoiding shortcuts in Firefox. The Firefox help lists many keyboard shortcuts, and there is more Firefox accessibility information in the MozillaZine knowledge base.

What really improved my use of commands was a post by Derek Featherstone back in November. The Ctrl+K to get to the search box, and the Ctrl+arrow up or Ctrl+arrow down was a browser breakthrough for me.

Not using Firefox? Hop over to Firefox and download! It’s my preferred browser, although I do have Internet Explorer and Opera installed for checking the way browsers display a particular site, and for generally staying in touch with the various options out there.