On my travels in the world of the blogs, I frequently (let’s be honest, almost always) admire and wonder at the beautiful blogs people have. Certainly aesthetically, but perhaps more important (to me), functionally: most particularly in terms of tagging. What I would like to do is to be able to tag (and hence categorise) articles on my blog so I can aggregate them for various purposes — not least as a traditional index so I can follow my own threads of logic.
I am not very technically able myself, and don’t have any time to get into this. So how about some help? Can anyone refer me to an organisation or better, a knowledgeable person who could come and visit me to set up a blog for me along the lines I envisage, and show me how to use it? I will pay the going rate! (Time is money).
I know that it is possible to tag on Blogger without driving the clicks away to an alien site like Technorati, but I can’t work out how to do it. I can see from other people’s Blogger blogs that you can do lots of interesting things with tags and categories, as well as design.
I have played around with a Typepad blog, as I think the tagging functionality is built-in, but I have not got very far on the prototype — I can’t seem to make anything happen. SixAlert (Typekey) is highly thought of if you believe what you read, but you have to pay them up-front (they say you can have a free trial but you have to pay first), and though I am happy to blog via paid subscription, I want to be sure that this will give me the features I want before signing up. Then there are blogs on platforms I haven’t heard of, such as Tribe’s, which have tabs as well as lots of other nice tagging/categorising features.
All sane suggestions for what I can do are more than welcome. (I live in Surrey, UK, or "outer London" as it can otherwise be known.) Please provide some contact details in the comments in the wonderful event that you are reading this and are a person who could come over and show me what to do! But even if no such person reads this posting, I am sure there is collective experience about how to find a technical expert who can help you to set up a blog, so I do hope very much to hear about it. Thank you.
what are you looking to do 🙂
Maxine, Typepad isn’t bad and its not all that expensive. The tagging comes about by the blogger being able to place articles in categories. On the other hand, you can also open a free account over at http://www.wordpress.com and start a blog using WordPress. I started Flashing In the Gutters there, but the problem is that they have frequent server issues, so I transferred it over to my own server.
Another problem with WordPress.com (and this is different from using WordPress to blog, mind you…wordpress.com is a server, WordPress is the software used to blog) is that you don’t have a lot of freedom to of templates.
The most freedom that you’ll have is buying your own server (well, you don’t actually buy it, you pay a monthly fee for server space) and then use WordPress or Movable Type to set up your own blogs.
Maxine, I’m not sure if this what you mean, but I add tags to my posts using my blogging application ‘Ecto’ (a Mac program, but I think it’s available for Windows too). It adds Technorati tags to the end of my posts and then ‘pings’ (i.e. notifies) the Technorati server. Is that the kind of thing you mean?
Thanks, Ian. I did try the Technorati thing a while back, but could only manage to get it to work manually (by pasting in code for the tag at the bottom of each posting) which was a drag. Also, if you use Technorati then the link takes you to their site. What I want is a searchable (via tags) index on Petrona. I know this is technically possible as I’ve seen it (even on Blogger)…..so I was/am hoping that by this post someone will contact me who knows some company or person or way of doing it..
Thanks also, Tribe. I think you grossly overestimate my technical competence/time constraints! I have got a wordpress version of Petrona but can’t seem to make anything work on that at all.
I don’t mind paying for the service, but I don’t want to pay and then find I can’t make it work.
I’ll keep trying!
Petrona 