Who Cares what Rich thinks!

Posts Tagged ‘plugin’

This is a test post using the Simple Tags plugin for WordPress.   I’m all about improving the efficiency in the things I do, and this is an attempt to streamline my blog posting.  I realize that’s it’s not going to make a HUGE difference in the amount of time it takes to write a post but even if it can save me a minute or two, I’m all for it. 

So the first thing I notice is that there’s a little text area in the upper right of the screen inside the admin Post screen.  I looked for other settings outside of this area and didn’t see anything until I looked in the Settings section.  We’ll at that stuff after I play with this post for awhile.   I’m guessing that I’m suppose to write some tags the box like this.

As you can see, I’ve populated that field with a few tags that are relavent to this post.  I’ve noticed that this text field has replaced the field that was previously in the WordPress Admin area for tags. 

Another addition to the admin panel is Click Tags and Suggested Tags this is shown below.  It’s quite a ways down on the page so you’ll have to scroll down to see it.  If your running the All in one SEO Pack plugin you’ll find these just above it. 

When you click on the Display Tags link, you it shows all the tags you’ve used in the past for other posts.  I can see how this would be pretty handy.

If you want to add a tag to your post you can simply click on of these that used previously.  I just tried it and it adds the clicked tag to the tag text box.  Sweet!  You see, in your regular WordPress installation you would have to type in all the tags.  It would suggest the previous tags as you typed but that’s not nearly as fast as this setup.

Now let’s see what happens when I want to get tags suggested from a third party.

Pretty cool!  The ones shown above are clearly the Yahoo suggested tags.  The OpenCalais, AlchemyAPI, and Zemant require an API key to access.  I’m not really interested in that at the moment so I’m not going to try those out.  The Tag the Net suggestions seem to be all over the place.  Here’s a look…

I’m more interested in managing my own tags than using someone’s (or something’s) suggested tags.  So this feature isn’t really something I’m interested in right now.  Like I said in the beginning, I’m really interested in those features that can streamline my blogging.

Now, let’s take a look at that Settings section a little bit.  In the settings you have the ability to make your tags links, set them as No-Follow, change some settings your tag cloud if you want one.  This little Simple Tag settings area will also give you the slug you need to put into your posts, pages, or widgets that you would like to display your tag cloud.  I looks like there are a bunch of settings in there for features that I’m not really concerned with so I’ll just let you go there and play around (on YOUR site not mine…lol).

Well, that’s pretty much it.  I’m going to run with this for a few days on this blog and then maybe migrated it to some of my other affiliate blogs if it proves to be helpful.  Actually, it might proved to be more helpful on those sites than this one.  The affiliate blogs that I run have a pretty tight set of keywords and tags that help them to improve traffic.  This blog will be somewhat all over the place as far as content is concerned so keeping the tags similar isn’t quite as important.