Tagging within blog posts?

March 8, 2012 9:36 AM

Tagging within blog posts?

I blog for an academic department updating faculty about new journal articles, news items, etc. related to their discipline. Many items (there are 10-20 per post) relate to one or more sub-disciplines, and I'd like to be able to tag at the item level to make it easier for readers to pull together items that are useful for their work.

Are there any blogging applications that will let me tag within posts, as well as at the post level?

posted by ryanshepard to computers & internet (14 answers total)

Possibly a silly recommendation, but if you're doing more or less a link/snippet blog, why not blog per-snippet and tag snippets?
posted by tmcw at 9:45 AM on March 8, 2012

Possibly a silly recommendation, but if you're doing more or less a link/snippet blog, why not blog per-snippet and tag snippets?

They've asked for a weekly summary, rather than a steady stream of individual items.
posted by ryanshepard at 9:57 AM on March 8, 2012

This is a really interesting question. I'm not exactly clear on what behavior you are visualizing for these intra-post tags though. Would this intra-post tag be separate from the main post tags or would they be part of the same system? Where would clicking on the intra-post tag take you? Would the tag be for multiple items in one post or for the same topic in different posts?
posted by Kimberly at 10:10 AM on March 8, 2012

So you're looking to have specific portions of text be tagged, is that right?
posted by backwards guitar at 10:12 AM on March 8, 2012

Hmm. I don't know of anything that does what you want. While not really tagging, here's one (daily newsletter) that gets around that issue by simply using a consistent list of categories in alphabetical order, with relevant news items filed in each. So if I search the blog for "Parking" I can kind of easily identify where the parking-relevant articles are.
posted by The Biggest Dreamer at 10:17 AM on March 8, 2012

How many different sub-disciplines do you envision? If it's a manageable number, you could simply create a page on the blog for each sub-discipline, and then link the relevant text from within the article to the appropriate page. If you turn on trackbacks within the site, each page will then become a list of links back to relevant sections of articles for that discipline. However, I could see this being unwieldy very quickly.
posted by COD at 10:33 AM on March 8, 2012

Post the summaries as usual and also post all of the items individually. Then think of a way so that people who want to only see summaries will only see the summaries. For instance with wordpress, you can have only a particular category of posts show up on the front page. RSS savvy users would be directed to the feed for the summary category. It's probably possible to do this on a wide variety of blog platforms.
posted by stuart_s at 10:38 AM on March 8, 2012

1) Would this intra-post tag be separate from the main post tags or would they be part of the same system? 2) Where would clicking on the intra-post tag take you? 3) Would the tag be for multiple items in one post or for the same topic in different posts?

1) Yes, as I haven't found a need to tag each post as a whole since it's a dedicated blog and covers the same broad subject every week.

2) Ideally, to a gathered list of all items with the tag clicked on, arranged in descending chronological order.

3) The same tag could be used for multiple items within a post, depending on subjects covered in articles in a given week.

How many different sub-disciplines do you envision? If it's a manageable number, you could simply create a page on the blog for each sub-discipline

Not more than 10 for now, but I'd like to minimize the amount of click-throughs readers have to do to get to the content, if possible.

For instance with wordpress, you can have only a particular category of posts show up on the front page. RSS savvy users would be directed to the feed for the summary category.

My readers are mostly not RSS-savvy, unfortunately - any solution here is going to have to be technologically very simple, at least as far as what's demanded by the users.
posted by ryanshepard at 10:56 AM on March 8, 2012

Ok. I work in web content strategy and I haven't ever found something like this (although I like the idea!) I don't know what blogging software you're using, but if it supports creating static pages in addition to blog posts the (manual, sorry!) work around I recommend is:

1. Create a separate page for each of the 10 topics. You will want to make sure that your blog template is set to display the pages in the sidebar or navigation somewhere.
2. When you create your weekly summary, create anchor tags for the different items you want to compile on the topic pages. (If you're not sure how to do this I can tell you how--just let me know what software you're using.)
3. Link to the anchor tags with a description of the item from the appropriate topic page dating them as you see fit.

It will take a bit of set up to get it where you want it, but once the initial set up is done it will be fairly quick. You can find practical ways to work this into your posting routine. I would, for example, have notepad open and keep track of the title/description of the item and the anchor tag name and then paste them all into the topic pages all at once).
posted by Kimberly at 11:09 AM on March 8, 2012 [2 favorites]

Thanks very much, Kimberly - I've been using Blogger, but have been considering moving over to Wordpress in hopes of having less issues with what seems like random code being inserted as I try to format text (lately, I've been writing the posts in Dreamweaver, moving the code over to Blogger, and then doing some additional formatting / clean-up.)

I know how to create HTML anchor links w/in a single page, but think I will need more detail to do what you're suggesting here.
posted by ryanshepard at 11:15 AM on March 8, 2012

I have no idea whatsoever how they do it, but Greater Greater Washington does it with their link posts (link). It's not obvious at the post level, but if you click one of the tags at the bottom, only the item tagged shows up in the list of posts. (See: Katz Out... in this list, which is one of the link items in the previous link.)

So, maybe you could ask them?
posted by General Malaise at 11:40 AM on March 8, 2012

I'm running to a meeting and then home, but I will mefi mail you with more details tomorrow.
posted by Kimberly at 11:42 AM on March 8, 2012

They've asked for a weekly summary, rather than a steady stream of individual items.

Rather than posting individual items as a steady stream, can you just post them all at once on Friday morning? (or whenever)

If they insist on having one page with just this week's links, you should be able to do that simply enough in many WordPress themes just by marking all new posts as "sticky" or "featured" (or whatever your theme supports) then resetting the flag when you're doing next weeks links.

Also note that if you go with the "post a summary which links to a bunch of individual posts on the same blog", then you might want to turn off commenting on the summary posts to keep discussion in one place.
posted by robtoo at 10:32 PM on March 8, 2012

Many, many thanks to Kimberly for her help with this.
posted by ryanshepard at 6:25 AM on March 13, 2012