And since I know lots of people will ask, I checked my plugins, and most of them (HeadMeta, Text Filter Suite, and Easy Gravatars), work just fine. The one that doesn’t work is Theme Preview. When I can find time, I’ll try to figure out why.

The official WP release is slated for March 10.

Update 2008-03-29: Something must have gotten fixed, because my Theme Preview plugin does indeed work in the release version of Wordpress 2.5.

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I will likely continue to post mostly technical observations here in my blog (with the occasional side-track into non-technical areas). More personal, everyday, short thoughts will go to Twitter (with the occasional technical note). I’ve got a couple of WordPress-related posts coalescing in the back of my brain, and I hope to find time to write them up and post them soon. Stay tuned!

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When Twitter first started, I didn’t think I’d see much value in it. Like many, I figured, “I’ve already got a blog, why would I need another service to maintain?” Then, Alex King asked me to look at a couple of things in his Twitter Tools plugin, so I signed up, just for testing things out. And also like many other people, I discovered that the deliberately small messages draw you in to making quick updates. Even though I’ve found it hard to make longer regular posts (like this one), posting a quick tweet on Twitter doesn’t distract me for long enough to interrupt my work flow in any significant way. Eventually, I’ll probably start reading and posting tweets from my phone, but for now, the web view, IM notices, and RSS feed serve my needs.

If you’re using Twitter, what was your reaction — was it similar to mine? Or did you immediately jump in? Or did you decide that you didn’t have a use for it? Do you use it more for posting your own thoughts, or for following others? If you haven’t tried it yet, why not?

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A couple of things that I discovered:

• I was always getting the ‘default‘ image until I added a ‘rating‘ parameter.
• The Gravatar server wasn’t serving up all sizes of my image until I re-uploaded it. It worked with size=40 and size=80, but not with size=60

When I did a quick search for an existing WordPress plugin, the Gravatar plugins I found all required you to modify your comments.php template file. I made mine less intrusive. I think I’ll go ahead and code up a plugin with some config options.

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What are categories?

A dictionary definition of category is, “A specifically defined division in a system of classification.” If you break that down, and consider what is meant by “a system of classification”, you’ll come to the conclusion that this refers to a highly structured, possibly hierarchical system. For example, to borrow from the classification system for living things, you might have a tree like “Animals -> Vertebrates -> Mammals -> Horses”. Any of those terms could be considered to be a category, and they fall into a strict structure.

What are tags?

In their most common usage, tags are keywords that you attach to a piece of content. Tags are “free-form”, which is to say that there is no formal restriction on what tags you attach. So, the basic difference between categories and tags is that categories are structured and tags are unstructured. For examples of popular web services that make good use of tags, see Flickr, Technorati, and Delicious, among others.

On the other hand, the help pages at Technorati define tags thusly: “Think of a tag as a simple category name. People can categorize their posts, photos and videos with any tag that makes sense.” They’re saying that tags are categories — so, are categories and tags different, or not?

How are categories and tags different?

If a tag can be thought of as a category, then how are they different? It really just comes down to how you use them. Typically, as we mentioned above, category systems are structured. In a given system, the categories are usually chosen with as little overlap as possible. Look at your typical mainstream news site — you’ll probably see categories like Politics, Business, Entertainment, Sports, Technology, and Lifestyle. The breadth of these categories covers just about any imaginable news story.

The problem arises when a story does overlap multiple thematic categories. What if you have a story about iRobot’s newest model of Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner — do you file it under Business, Tech, or Lifestyle? In many systems, you can assign multiple categories. But even in that case, there are often reasons to specify a primary category. Slashdot is a good example — if you look at their main page, each story has a single icon which represents the primary category. This is a quick visual indicator which helps you identify stories that might interest you. Then, if you click into a specific article, you’ll see the icons of other categories that the story fits into.

And in a strict category system, visitors using your search feature might use terms that don’t appear in the content or category names. What if Alice was trying to find the Roomba story, but couldn’t remember the name of the device or its manufacturer? She might try a search for “gadget”, or “carpet”, but maybe those terms were never in the story. This is where tags can help refine searches by giving additional keywords. If our story had tags like “business, technology, tech, lifestyle, gadget, floor, carpet, vacuum, cleaning, household, home, robot, robotics” and other relevant terms, then there are lots of extra hooks for searches to latch onto.

Which should I use?

There are some people who have discarded the hard structure of categories in favor of the free-form nature of tags. There are a few folks who prefer the clean thematic separation of a category system, and avoid the messiness of inconsistent tags. But most folks should feel free to get the best of both worlds. A while back, I started using my categories as tags. I create new categories on the fly, as seems fit. But I’ve gradually started to regret that decision. What I really wanted was to have both a category to specify the overall main theme for each post, and a set of tags to aid in searching.

In WordPress prior to version 2.3, the “category” system could be used as a “tag” system simply by the nature of how the user chose to express them. The difference was simply a matter of semantics. The same holds true with the new tagging system in WP 2.3, really — it’s all a matter of how you choose to use the underlying system. But the availability of a flexible taxonomy system now provides a way to clearly delineate a separation between “categories” and “tags”, and even user-created tertiary categorization systems. Previously, this type of flexibility was only possible through third-party plugins.

Whether you choose to stick with distinct categories, tags, or a combination of both, is really a matter of your personal preferences. But whichever path you choose, WordPress will be able to give you the tools you need to organize your content the way that you like.

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In this article, Bob briefly outlines six benefits that he gets from writing on his blog: Meet and Greet, Self Documenting, Self Promotion, Mentoring, Education, and Giving Back. Even though I don’t make time to post something new every day (I wish I could), I have some of the same thoughts and feelings about why I keep a blog. Click on over, read his post, tell Bob why you blog. And tell him that Dougal sent you.

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• The “Blogger Code of Conduct”
• Don Imus’ racial slurs
• Anna Nicole’s baby-daddy

You’re welcome.

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The rel="nofollow" idea had good intentions: to give content producers a way to link to another site without implying that they approve of it. The way it works is that if Google, or Yahoo!, or any other service that uses this standard sees a rel="nofollow" attribute on a link, they will ignore it. They don’t follow the link, and they don’t count the link in the destination site’s ranking calculations. One of the main use cases (as in WordPress’ case), was to reduce the effectiveness of comment spam, because the spammers would not get any “Google Juice” out of the links. Hurray for our side! We just stuck our finger in the spammer’s eye!

Unfortunately, we also tweaked the eyes of our regular readers, most of whom could probably use a little of that Juice. “Oh well,” we said. “That’s just the price we have to pay for a little peace of mind.” Well, most of us said that. Some were adamantly opposed to the nofollow idea. Many of us knew that it was just a bandaid, and that it wouldn’t really deter spammers from trying, it would just reduce their ability to get high rankings in search engines.

At the time, comment spam was a pretty major problem on many blogs, and there weren’t many effective remedies. It seemed like all of us spent the beginning of each day going through our comment queue, manually deleting the garbage that made it through the gauntlet of whatever defenses we did have in place. So, nofollow was the last-ditch attempt to deny satisfaction to the spammers when our other measures failed. But it did not discriminate. It had no way to know whether it was de-juicing a good guy or a bad guy. (Eric Meyer had some good thoughts on this subject, BTW.)

These days, many sites have better anti-spam measure in place. Akismet has been very effective, and many WordPress users swear by Spam Karma 2. With measures like these in place, hardly any spams ever make it through to be displayed on your blog. And if they do, hopefully you delete them pretty quickly after they appear. So, that’s even better than just telling search engines not to index their links. They can’t index something that they never see in the first place, right?

With that in mind, I’ve installed Kimmo Suominen’s dofollow plugin here, and configured it to remove the rel=”nofollow” attribute from comment links after two days. The two day limitation is to account for the occasional hiccup where spam might make it through over a weekend, and I don’t get to delete it immediately. The important thing is that I’ll be giving back the Juice to the comments that get to stay here. If you’ve got a WordPress blog, and you feel like comment spam is under control on your site, I encourage you to do the same.

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Plans by Death Cab for Cutie

You know how sometimes a song comes along and gets stuck in your head? But in a good way. Not in that “Oh my God, if I don’t get this song out of my head I’ll go freaking insane” way. More in that “I could listen to this song on repeat all day long and not get tired of it” way. I need to find all those songs in my collection and burn a CD of them.

Anyhow, ‘Soul Meets Body’ by Death Cab for Cutie is one of those songs for me right now. I particularly like this bit, which reminds me of blogging, or of writing in general:

In my head there’s a Greyhound station
Where I send my thoughts to far-off destinations
So they may have a chance of finding a place
Where they’re far more suited than here

Yeah. Blogging is like that.

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