Category: Blogging

Improvised “Tags” for WordPress Pages

Over the past two days, I’ve moved a lot of content to WordPress.com. Most of it has been published as pages, rather than posts. Last night, I wondered how I was going to go about making those 90-some pages of content more discoverable.

Also last night, I figured out a workaround.

You can do this in a page or post, but I prefer using a Custom HTML widget.

All you have to do—in that widget, page, or post—is create a series of links to search results within your site.

Format your links like this, where “tag” is the term you want to run a search for:

<a href="/?s=tag">tag</a>

or

<a href="domain.tld/?s=tag">tag</a>

So, for example, if I wanted to create a “tag” for “workaround” on this site, I would write this:

<a href="/?s=workaround">Workaround</a>

or

<a href="sharonda.net/?s=workaround">Workaround</a>

or

<a href="smwoodfin.wordpress.com/?s=workaround">Workaround</a>

I’m currently using relative URLs (the version which doesn’t include the domain) because the code won’t need to be updated even if it’s served from a different address, and for consistency between my primary domain and my WordPress.com subdomain.

You can see how this works by clicking here: Workaround

This workaround isn’t quite as simple as adding a tag on a post, but the method will work for both sites and pages, and it’s not at all difficult to implement.

This Site is Now Hosted at WordPress.com

Updated November 1st, 2017, to add a link to my tagging workaround.

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If you’ve shown up here after having visited Sharonda.net in the past, and are currently very confused, see the title of this post. In the interest of preserving URLs, the site’s old blog posts have been moved to pages, and you can find them via the Archived Content page.

I know that may be a bit inconvenient, but I had to choose between letting posts keep their categories and tags or letting them keep their original URLs, and URLs won out.

I’m still feeling my way around how things are done at WordPress.com versus self-hosted WordPress, and trying to make sure that links won’t be broken whether the site is accessed via Sharonda.net or SMWoodfin.WordPress.com, in part because I’m future-proofing.

Hopefully, within the next few days, I’ll figure out some sort of tagging system for all the content here that is now served as pages, rather than posts, even if I have to do it manually.

Blogging Beyond the Grave

This is just a note to myself, really, but I thought I’d share it for anyone else who might be trying to decide between WordPress.com and WordPress.org.

I have a self-hosted WordPress site with a custom domain, and I’ve been thinking about moving it to WordPress.com so that I’m free from having to deal with the more technical aspects of keeping a blog. Not that I hate dealing with those aspects, but it becomes a distraction for me, and distractions mean lost productivity.

This morning, though, it sunk in that whatever I post at WordPress.com will probably outlive me. I used to want my stuff to expire after I did, but now, I have a wife. She’s promised to outlive me, as well, and I would like it if, once I’m gone, she would be able to go back and see some of the things that I’ve posted. My self-hosted site won’t allow that once the money runs out. I don’t want her to fund it in perpetuity, but even if she did, it’s unreasonable to expect her to keep the software updated.

And who wants to be running WordPress 4.8.2 a decade or two from now?

Yeah. Me, neither.

I wouldn’t have thought, even a few years ago, that marriage and mortality would be prime factors in my hosting decisions, but there ya have it! Crawling toward 50 really does change things!

Testing the WordPress Kindle Fire App

This is my first post using the WordPress app for Kindle Fire. I’m not a WordPress fan, but blogging via my Fire on my TypePad blog is far less than ideal. If all goes well with this post, and TypePad doesn’t introduce a Fire app in, say, the next few hours, you can expect more Fire-driven posts to blaze into existence rather quickly.