Tagless

Published 09/22/2024

When I started blogging in 2014, I used WordPress. One of the ways you would organize your written blog posts on there would be to include tags. (This is still the preferred method for most blogging platforms)

Tags are a way for you to link your related content, so if I was writing about Java often, I would include a ‘Java’ tag. Then any pages with the ‘Java’ tag would be linked. (Tags can also help with SEO)

I was never all that great with organizing my tags. So when I thought about designing a new writing platform, going tag-less was my goal.

Until today, I never really thought about how I would categorize different forms of content on my website. I essentially ran into the problem tags solve.

To resolve it, I used a feature I threw in earlier while developing this platform. Which is essentially hierarchical category posts based on the directory parent / child relationship.

So, notes put inside of /notes/tools are part of the Tools category. /notes/demos are part of the Demos category. Then /notes shows content from both categories.

This solves the problem, and as a bonus it forced better organization of my posts.

As a downside, it forced the URLs from /notes/post-title to /notes/tools/post-title. To get around this I modified an existing concept that we had previously called Collapsed URLs.

Collapsed URLs turn /projects/Jaxon into /Jaxon, slightly modified it turned /notes/tools/post-title into /notes/post-title.

From an SEO perspective, you would want to collapse the URL entirely from /notes/tools/post-title to /post-title, but I’m reserving that for project pages instead of posts.