tags and categories

I acknowledge and accept that the categorization of my posts on this blog are largely worthless. 90% of what I post about gets lumped into “politics” or “misc”.

I am not drinking the tagging kool-aid entirely, but I do think it would be more useful for my blog than how I currently use categories (which is basically hardly at all).

I am considering installing and using Ultimate Tag Warrior, but one thing concerns me: it uses data external from wordpress itself – potentially in such a way that it differs from other tagging plugins, or even from how WordPress eventually may implement tagging.

My blog has always been relatively agnostic as to what software it’s using as far as the data specific to any one post. When it came time to migrate from movable type to wordpress, there was no third-party data I had to figure out how to cram into WordPress. It was just the basic stuff. It’s not a big deal, but I find myself wondering if starting to rely on tags as gathered, stored, and displayed separately by a one-off third-party plugin will be a headache if/when I ever decide to move to some other platform.

Naturally if push came to shove I’m sure it would not be brain surgery to write a script by hand to migrate the data from one to the other, but still.

UPDATE: Okay, to hell with it. I went ahead and installed Ultimate Tag Warrior and modified my templates to use tags. It shows the top 10 tags on the right where categories used to be, and you can view a full tag-cloud as well, which for now is mostly just the old categories I used.