Categories and Tags, Oh My

So. WordPress is awesome.

WordPress also supports tags as well as categories.

I was pretty much using categories as tags on my old blog. I had categories for every damn thing. But in most WordPress templates, that is kind of wonky. Plus, it seems wrong somehow. Categories should be broad, tags should be sorta like… index entries or something.

But: to change how things are currently set up, I would have to go through and manually re-tag and re-categorize every entry on this poor old blog of mine. D’you know how many blog entries I have?

2, 205.

Plus 41 drafts, somehow. Which: wtf?

It took me forever to manually import about 300 posts into my reviews blog setup. God only knows how long it’d take me to manually tag and categorize over 2,000 posts.

OTOH, the German in me is like, “Yes! Ve must haff ORDER! RE-TAG EVERYZING!”*

So. I think the middle ground is probably to recategorize everydamnthing as “uncategorized” and just start working my way backwards. While I’m doing that, I can look for obsolete links that got lost in the transition. It’ll take forever, but hell, there’s a search box if you want to look for something. Chances are good that if you search for “fibromyalgia” you’ll find all the posts that used to be in my “fibromyalgia” category. (I think I’m going to have a general “Health” category, or possibly a “Whining” category, and tag posts with “fibromyalgia” and “chondromalacia” and “goddammit I should be on House by now”)

Also: I’d be interested to hear the thoughts of other WordPress users on categories vs tags! How do you guys handle it?

*For those not in on the family joke: Germans like order. Germans created the autobahn, which is so meticulously designed that you can drive on it at racecar speeds without flying off it or hitting a bump. Germans machine meticulously-crafted parts and speak a ridiculously precise language and blahblahblah. Whenever I used to get cranky about things not being sufficiently orderly, my folks would say I was being “so German” and blame my Dad’s German heritage. This is extra-funny because while my Dad is awesome and can build very spiffy, meticulously-designed wood furniture, he’s not exactly picky about order in other areas. Like his desk. Whereas I, his half-German spawn, really want to live in a creepily-orderly home. I’m just too lazy to actually do it.