Happy 2025 internet surfers! This is a quick post with my thoughts about structuring blog post categories and tags.
These are just my thoughts today, and may change in the future. Doing your own thinking and research is always recommended!
Definitions
Google AI Overview says this:1
A blog category is a broad topic that groups related posts together, acting like a chapter in a book, while a tag is a more specific keyword that describes the details of a single post, allowing you to link related content across different categories, similar to an index in a book; essentially, categories provide a high-level overview of topics, while tags offer a granular view of individual post content.
I think that definition is good enough for us.
Categories
I prefer having one word categories:
- blogging
- software
- web
- reviews
- rants
I think keeping the category to one (short) word shows more clearly that it is the category. For example, here are a couple of posts as they appear on my index page:
The first post has two tags, the second has only one, but a three word tag. But, they both have one word categories. To my eye, they look cleaner like that. Plus, I can’t think of anything that can’t be reduced down to one word. Well, not yet anyway!
Of course, it can sometimes be hard to decide which category a post belongs to. Maybe you’ve written a great article about setting up some feature of Apache. What’s the best category for it? apache, web-dev, httpd and many more possibilities…
I would (and do) just shove that one in web. Blogging posts could also go in web but as I write quite a few posts about blogging, they get their own category.
Tags
To use a bookshop analogy, if the category is the section, i.e. history, fiction, geography, politics etc.
Then tags for history might include:
- Second World War
- Ancient Rome
- European History
- World History
And each one of those could be broken down further. Ultimately, a tag allows you more specificity. The longest tag I currently have on this blog is naturally extracted tobacco which lives in the vaping category.
My Approach
I write this after (yet again) attempting to tidy up and rationalise my categories and tags. I’ve written a few post about OpenSMTPD and they had a category of mail and a tag of opensmtpd. I’ve decided it makes more sense to just tag them smtp so if I decide to write a post about Postfix, or Exim, they will also be categorised as mail and tagged as smtp.
As usual, there is no one correct way. If you run a humourous blog, you probably won’t need a “humour” category as everything is (hopefully) going to be funny. Instead your categories might be:
- People
- Animals
- Bloopers
- Pranks
- Classic
and your tags might be:
- Old People
- Kids
- Cats
- Dogs
- Rabbits
Why it Matters
If you have RSS or Atom feeds that people actually read, then it will matter a lot. Regular web search visitors also might want to read other posts with a similar theme. Picking and sticking to a sensible naming convention will help both you, and them.
Footnotes
1 I must admit the new first AI Overview result is often the best. God help us humans :(
