Since I moved my blog over to WordPress from MovableType, I’ve been using the social bookmarking service del.icio.us to tag and organize my posts. Blogging software typically has a built-in form of tagging commonly know as categories, but categories pre-date true, modern tagging (aka, “folksonomy”:2). In addition, categories are very limited, not social and time consuming to create and manage. Hence my use of del.icio.us.

The account that I have created to manage my post tags on del.icio.us is called “_ZoingerPosts_”:3. When del.icio.us was first launched, it was total “flat” — that is, it listed all tags together in alphabetical order or by frequency. However, as del.icio.us’ service matured, they have added ways for users to create a form of hierarchy through a feature called _tagged bundles_. I wrote a “post”:4 on tagged bundles a while back which explained how to create them — which with everything on del.icio.us is not exactly obvious (this is part of del.icio.us’ charm!).

When you browse to my “ZoingerPosts”:3 account, the page displays on the left hand side a chronological list of my posts. This is useful, but not nearly as useful as the right hand side. On the right side, a list of all the tags I have created is grouped first by the tagged bundles (and their associated tags) and then by a list of the remaining tags (that is, those tags not included in a tagged bundle). Here’s a partial screen shot of the right hand side.

!/img/zoingerposts_righthandside.png!

Overall, I’m finding this to be a really handy tool to sort through my list of archived posts. For example, to find the post that I had written on _tagged bundles_, all I had to do was do a find on the ZoingerPosts page for the word _tagged_ (i.e., _cntrl + F_ followed by _tagged_ in Firefox). This changed the focus of my browser to the tag _tagged.bundles_ in the list of tags. Clicking on the tagged.bundles tag opened up “this”:5 page listing my post on del.icio.us’ tagged bundles feature.

[5(ZoingerPosts tagged.bundle tag page)]http://del.icio.us/ZoingerPosts/tagged.bundle

[4(Zoinger post on tagged bundles)]http://www.zoinger.com/words/archives/2005/04/26/delicious-hierarchy-a-new-feature/

[3(ZoingerPosts del.icio.us account - home of Zoinger post tags)]http://del.icio.us/zoingerposts

[2(Wikipedia on folksonomy)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy

[1(Delicious home page)]http://del.icio.us