A few months ago I installed Jerome's keyword plugin and modified it a little bit to fit my needs. From that point on I used tags basically exclusively to organize my posts here. Categories seem to me far too strict back then so using Tags was a logical choice. Still: You always have to come up with the keywords yourself, which is sometimes - at least for me - quite annoying.
Basically I'd love to blog completely without categories and tags just using a good search engine with a useful indexing so that I won't have to think about keywords myself. That's one of the reasons why I was thinking about using Drupal for blogging, since it's (AFAIK) rebuilding the search index via cron and not whenever a user is searching. But in WordPress you have to use some category or tagging system to not have to use the search function excessively.
Another downside of tagging is, that it's not part of the MetaWeblog/Blogger/MT-API so you can't simply tag using one of the many external blogging tools like the Performancing plugin (which I'm using right now to write this post) or Flock. If I will keep using these tools with WordPress 2.0 (with it's WYSIWYG editor) is a completely different question (at least after I've started extending it a little bit ;)
of course, you could think of installing phpDig to do the searching, which can also run cronjobs to spider your site. I've been playing with it and want to try to implement a basic search engine for electronic music related websites soon using it. If only I had time to do more than just play around with it ;)
Dec. 22, 2005, 9:36 p.m.