"Hacking" Blogger -Tagging

Because I know that several of you use Blogger for your blog(s), I figured I'd post this here as well as libraryland.

I love the ease of Blogger, and use it for all but one of my blogs (libraryland is done in WordPress). But, the one thing I have always wished that Blogger supported is tagging or "catagories" for posts. Well, the good news is that Blogger has added this functionality in its Beta version; the bad news is that Beta is not yet available to everyone (you can sign-up for a Beta Blogger blog if you have a gmail account - I have a few invites left, email if you'd like one).

However, if you'd like to add tags to your Blogger posts before the Beta becomes public, I have found two relatively easy ways to do that.

The first method is using the easy Zoom Clouds app (thanks, Geeky Artist Librarian!), which you can check out in my sidebar. In a few minutes you can have a nifty "tag cloud" added to the sidebar of any blog you own. It updates itself, and you can customize the look of the cloud, which is cool. However, the "tags" are chosen by the application, and are based on frequently occuring keywords in your posts. This is fine with me, but some of you may want more control of your tag words.

If so, welcome to Qumana, method number two. Qumana is a blog editing tool that you download and use in place of your Blogger (or other) editor. Qumana lets you add tags to your posts, and they show up after the post title. Nifty. This program is also useful if you host several blogs using several blogging tools - just sign into Qumana and edit all of your blogs from one place. Oh, yeah - if you are so inclined, you can use both Zoom Cloud and Qumana in tandem, and create tag clouds using the tags you specify in Qumana. Way cool.

This may all be a moot point once Blooger Beta becomes public, but both of these apps work with other blog editors as well. Tag away!