Please remember that you are choosing to read my opinions.

-- I thought that there may be some people that are still hesitant about mindsay tags. Figured that while I was taking a break from reading "Rendezvous with Rama" I'd write something on Mindsay Tags. An amateur guide, if you will.

A great new feature introduced recently to Mindsay is the Tag feature. It is a a tool available to the mindsay community to allow members to place their entry with a group of other entires my other members. In other words, you are making your blog posts more available to people who are interested in what you are talking about. As more people use the tag feature, It will allow members to click on the tags at the beginning of posts containing tags and find similar blogs around mindsay.

Tagging is easy! The easiest way to come up with relevant tags is to first write your entry. Afterwards, think about appropriate key words, themes, topics, and so one and sum them up as concisely as possible. Then, add them to the "Tags" box below the subject box, and above the entry you've just written. If the tags you want to use are only one word long, or a series of words are run together, you just type them in. If the tag requires a space, use quotations around it. "spicy pork" is a combination of two words in one tag, but typing spicy pork results in two different tags; spicy and pork. Remember, there is no need to use commas to seperate the tags. Just use spaces between seperate tags.

For example, this entry is about Mindsay Tags. The suggested tags being suggested to me are "tags suck", "stupid tags", mindsay, and tags. Of these, I will add "Mindsay" and "Tags" to this, so that people looking for information on these things, and curious enough to browse the tagged entries, will find this post that hopefully relates to what they are looking for.

I recommend thinking of as many related tags as possible when writing an entry since you never know what someone is going to be looking for. For example, you may notice that I always tag my entries with my user name, but I do so both with and without a space. This is so, in the unlikely event that someone is making a reference to my blog on their blog, I will see it listed along with the blogs that I have written. If you write a book review, like I did recently, then you might want to have tags that say 'books "book review" literature' and so on.

I know that some of you miss the topics, but this is pretty much the same thing. When you tag an entry you are placing it into a group of entries with similar tags, just like the defunct Mindsay Topics feature used the topics to group entries. All you need to do is add the topic into the tag box and the same thing is happening, granted that people are using appropriate tags.

Feel free, as always, to add more information to this or clarify things where I may have lacked clarity.

Additional References:

Staff Blog Entry: http://staff.mindsay.com/?entry=16