Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
5
How People Think About Categories
People like to put things into firm, fixed categories. The Dewey Decimal System, used by libraries,
and the taxonomies used to classify plants and animals were both great intellectual achievements
in classification.
Unlike either of these two systems, WordPress categories are quite flexible. You can change them
at any time and you can even, horror of horrors, put one post into multiple categories. Not a very
purist thing to allow—but a very useful one.
Categories also tell you something about the things that are being categorized. When you expose
your categories to visitors, for example with the Categories or Category Cloud widgets, people will
size up your categories (and, with Category Cloud, their popularity) to decide how interesting your
blog is likely to be to them.
Your categories also might directly inspire new posts. Once you create a Vegetarian Meals cate-
gory on your cooking blog to host your vegetarian lasagna recipe, the temptation to fill out the cat-
egory might then pull you in a direction you hadn't planned on.
So enjoy the categorization effort; it's an important part of your ongoing interaction with your blog
visitors and with the topics that emerge as you add new posts to your blog.
Where Do Categories Appear?
The categories you assign a post to are listed at the bottom of the post when it appears in your
blog. The categories also appear in the Category and Category Cloud widgets; we recommend you
use one or the other. You can also choose to have the categories appear in feeds of your blog post-
ing, as described in Chapter 2, “Starting Your Blog Right.”
Using and Creating Categories
Putting posts into categories is easy—so is creating categories as you go along. This kind of
bottom-up categorization is at the heart of using categories.
Follow these steps to categorize a post—in an existing category
or one you create on the spot:
caution
As your list builds, try hard
to fit your posts into existing
categories; few categoriza-
tions are exact, but it's better
to have 10 slightly fuzzy cat-
egories than 30 precise ones.
1.
In the main Add/Edit Post screen, click the down arrow on the
Categories header, if needed, to expand it.
2.
Click the Most Used tab to see if any of the Most Used cate-
gories are the best home(s) for your post, as shown in
Figure 5.1. Click the check box(es) next to the category or
categories that fit.
