Using Tags and Tag Clouds in your Blogging
Monday, February 8th, 2010
Tags, depending on how you look at them, can be both very beneficial to your blogs and a pain. Some bloggers really enjoy being able to categorize their posts in laymens terms, while others think they’re just a cheaper version of categories. I’m not claiming there’s a right or wrong way to run a blog, but looking at both aspects is key in deciding whether you should use the tagging system.
Tags have been around for much longer than blogging, if you consider how some social networking sites such as Delicious and Technorati have been using them since originally launching.
I’m going to point out the straight facts about running tags on your blog. I don’t want to push a certain idea one way or the other – I’m just discussing facts about the tagging system, and having you, the reader, question whether you think you should be using it on your blog.
Web design blogs have been popping up around the web faster than weeds can grow, and there’s no surprise about that. The topic of web design is fast growing and many people want to learn it. However, at times it can be a little overwhelming and seem like there is no way you can go through all of the news in one day. So what’s the answer? Social media sites.
There are new social bookmarking sites popping up every day on the internet, growing as fast as blogging. There have been many popular sites that have exploded onto the web, such as Delicious and Digg. However, people are constantly looking for the “next big thing”, and social bookmarking is definitely the way to go.
After spending a lot of time following StumbleUpon on Twitter, I finally found a beta keycode to enter and register to their new URL shortener.
After Digg’s huge success, there were bound to be many copycat sites. The first popular site exploding on the net was 
I have seen many different pieces of software out there, ranging from Craigslist posters to MySpace Friend Adder’s and Automated Diggers, but I have never heard as much hype as I have with 
It seems like each and every day there are tons of web design blogs posting up amazing articles containing great content for us web designers to read, download, or try. However, keeping up with all of these different blogs can be a hassle. Luckily we have a solution: Digg-based sites for the web design niche! I have collected 5 Digg-styled website design and development themed sites for all you web designers out there to add to your “daily site’s to visit” list, and check out their front page articles. So without further ado, here’s the list! 
Along with Digg’s sleek color scheme and AJAX-based development, there are many fancy features on the site that fascinate me. So for today’s demo, I have decided to create a character counter that counts how many characters you have entered into a field a limits the amount you can have. This is seen on Digg’s submit page, which limits the amount of characters you can enter for a title and a description. It is a really neat effect that can be useful for many different reasons, such as limiting how long a username can be, or making sure a set number of characters are entered for information (like a phone number).