Tech T.I.P. Artivcle 8/2/12

Shine a light on your archives

Tech T.I.P.

Denise Barrett Olson

As Graveyard Rabbits, you've been documenting a number of cemeteries and graves in your blog. Your archives are full of interesting people and places, but unfortunately one of the drawbacks to the blog platform is the way most of them manage those archives. What enticements do you offer your readers to dig into those archives to find all those great stories? Years and months? I thought so.

If you're a WordPress blogger, you have a number of options that can help you organize your posts for easier access. Although Blogger's organizational features are more limited, there are still things you can do to shine some light on your older articles. Let's take a look.

Starting with WordPress, you have two features for organizing posts: categories and tags. Categories help you arrange the display of your content while tags are like quick searches to pull together posts from across the entire site.

My Graveyard Rabbit articles are part of my Moultrie Journal blog. Notice in this example there is a Graveyard Rabbit of Moultrie Creek menu item in the top menu. WordPress can use the category feature to provide these "section" menus for you automatically. When a reader clicks on that menu item, WordPress will collect all the posts assigned to that category and arrange them in reverse chronological order - just as if they were their own separate blog.

When writing a post, my category list is right under the Publish button so it's easy to check a box before I hit Publish. Notice the Tags box just below my categories. I use this to further define my content. Tags are entered into the text box separated by commas and when the Add button is pressed, they will appear just below the box as you see here.

This post is documenting a specific grave so I've included a tag naming the cemetery and another with the surname of the individual buried here. I have a standard set of tags I use to identify the various types of content and topics within the blog.

WordPress has a very nice tag cloud widget which you can use to display your tags in your blog's sidebar like the one you see in the example above. Notice that some tags are larger than others. That means there are more posts tagged with that tag. When the reader clicks on a tag, WordPress will present her with all the posts associated with that tag. The displayed posts will cross category boundaries. By clicking on the "graveyard" tag, the reader will see the stories I've written about different graveyards in my area. Click on the "Huguenot Cemetery" tag and the reader sees both the article about the cemetery and posts about individual graves located in that cemetery.

Blogger users can put Labels to work in the same manner to give their readers access to topics within your archives.

In both WordPress and Blogger, you can use the URL generated when you click on a tag or label to send your viewers to that collection of posts. And, as you add more articles with that tag, this URL will include them too.

Regardless of the built-in features your blog platform offers, there are any number of manual ways you can - and should - spotlight your archives. Have you thought to publish a "roundup" post that links to earlier articles related to a specific topic? You might publish an article on the Civil War veterans at a specific cemetery with links to each veteran you've documented in earlier posts. How about a recap of this family group or those killed in an epidemic? These are all great ways to not only shine some light on your archives, but also provide a bit more historical context to those individuals.

The more you write, the more valuable your archives become. Don't allow them to get lost in the dust of your platform's default organization. Yes, it will take some effort to tag/label earlier posts but you'll find many rewards too. I'm looking forward to enjoying some GYRabbits Greatest Hits real soon!