Blogger by Tag

Iam in the process of tagging my posts. "Tagging" is the hot internet term for assigning keywords, or "tags," to just about anything on the web for easy searching and on-the-go categorization — as always, see the Wikipedia entry. Tags are a form of metadata. That is as much information theory as you're going to get from me.

There is no native Blogger support for tags or categories, so things here could be a bit messy over the next few days as I screw around under the hood.

After a thorough Google search (because that's where information comes from), I feel in the Blogger-tagging know. Many creative individuals, of which I am not one, have though up clever ways by which to implement tags in Blogger. These "hacks" fall under three broad categories:

1. Leveraging the tagging power of del.icio.us.
2. Creating a new blog for each category and linking them together in a clever fashion (this is more category- than tag-oriented).
3. Linking to an intra-blog Google Blog Search for each tag.

Each of these hacks has its own advantages and disadvantages. I'm starting with 3, as it's the easiest to implement. Further down the road, I might move to a more powerful and elegant combination of 1 and 2. That is, of course, unless Blogger beats me to the punch, which, given the apparent popular demand, is likely.¹

I'll try to keep you, loyal reader, posted (har har! — blogging puns). Please do let me know via comment if you have any questions, complaints, suggestions, or, um, comments.

¹ Speaking of popular demand — if you, like me, want Blogger to add native tag support, make yourself heard! Blogger keeps a running user Wish List, so go vote vote vote for "I want a way to organize posts by topic or category."

Update: apparently our voices were heard, because tagging support was among the features Google chose to included in the new Blogger (they call them labels, c.f. Google Mail). DR has been updated appropriately and my hack-y system has been removed.