A tag cloud for TypePad

ONE of the difficulties of managing a big website with many articles on it is making sure your readers can find what they need easily.

Although search engines can help with this, some way of ordering or 'tagging' individual articles is a great way of pointing people to items that may interest them.

However, TypePad falls down in this department and although you can use categories these can soon get out of hand and prove difficult to manage.

One way I'm experimenting with at the moment on my This French Life site is to use the bookmarking tools found on del.icio.us.

This is a great service that allows you to store links to internet pages all in one place and that you can add reminder keywords or 'tags' to so you can find them quickly and easily.

So I've used this principle to try and bring some order to the 1,000 or more articles on my French site.

I have created an account with del.icio.us and every article I write is now given a couple of descriptive tags, and over time I will slowly go through my archive and do the same.

Then using the 'tag cloud' tool from del.icio.us I have created a page on This French Life that highlights all the different keywords I've given articles and so with one click people can see all the relevant pieces.

Then with the click of a headline people are back on my website to read the article.

Comments

[Andrea Wren]

More helpful stuff Craig, thanks, I was wondering about this myself. Now, how did you add the little image of yourself in the banner? Have you covered this on your site and can I search? If not, howz about that for your next article? ;-)

[Michael Sippey]

Hey, Craig. One other thing that we now have in TypePad is the ability to display your category list in a "Cloud" format. That will show your more frequently used categories in your blog in bigger type, and less frequently used ones in smaller type. You can see it in action on my blog, which is linked above. You can add that module to your blog by visiting the Design tab for your blog and clicking on the "Change Content Selections" link.