Popular blogging systems out there all have ways to organize your posts. Aside from date archives, the other two major organization methods are categories and tags.
The category is generally what you would file a post under that fits one theme, like movie reviews under one called "Movies". Tags are for categorizing the post content even further by specifically pointing out topics within topics. For example, on my site I post all Internet-related posts under "Internet", but if I talk about Wordpress in the post I'll tag it with "wordpress". I don't always talk about that subtopic, so it's no use to me to make it a primary category unless I do.
All that being said, I'm curious as to how others organize their blog posts. Do you use both methods or only one? Do you consider either helpful to you and/or your visitors?
I used to be all about using categories and tags, but lately I've been thinking about how useful tags really are to me. How often would someone click on a tag to see what other posts are in that subtopic? Why not just use my search box to look for other posts with "wordpress" in them? Do tags "clutter" up a website?
Also, if you just use categories, do you organize your posts under more than one? If you use a "pretty URL" structure for your blog posts, do the multiple categories clash with that structure at all? I'm considering taking the category out of my permalink structure altogether to minimize this risk for SEO.
All opinions welcome from users of any blogging system.
You are correct! Before WP had tagging I was using a tag plugin, so it wasn’t too hard of a transition once WP implemented the feature. However, I know exactly what you mean, I have a few hundred posts from years ago that have not been tagged and I probably don’t want to do it either.