How to make category tabs in wordpress.com

One design feature that many WordPress blogs have and that no TypePad blog has is page tabs. You have probably seen them on many wordpress.com blogs, and you can see them on this blog too: The tabs “Home”, “About”, “Contact” and “Scoreboard” are pointing to pages. But did you know that you can make them point to categories instead?

How to take away global tags and categories in WordPress

Today deserves two posts. What I learned yesterday by applying CSS to my theme was an eye-opener. With very few tricks even the most dull of the WordPress templates can be turned into something fully personal and unique. I also learned one more thing. You don’t have to display the global tags and categories under, over or near your post, you can simply hide them.

TypePad versus WordPress: Nested categories

On this blog it may not make much sense, at least not yet, but WordPress has one category functionality that TypePad does not have: nested categories, or parent categories and children categories if you so wish. Dividing your categories into more categories is a very useful feature if you are blogging about topics within a topic. It can give your blog a much better structure than just listing the categories.

On this blog I could for instance make something like this:

TypePad
— Pros
— Cons

WordPress
— Pros
— Cons

where Pros and Cons are children categories of their parent categories, TypePad and WordPress. This is very nice if you want to structure your topics neatly instead of just listing them one by one. Mind you, by default, categories are ordered alphabetically. If you desire a different order, you need to put the categories into a text widget by hand.

So how do you do it?

Annoying or good thing about WordPress? Global/local tags and categories

Suppose you’re reading a nice blog on wordpress.com. You’d like to read more on the same subject, so you click the category link or tag link under/over/next to the post…what happens? Suddenly you’re taken to the wordpress.com site where you get a list of all posts on all blogs on wordpress.com that use the same category or tag. But you only wanted to see posts on this blog…Well, then you have to click the categories or tags in the sidebar… that is, if the blog owner uses his widgets. Most do, luckily.

Writing a post in TypePad versus WordPress

A blogger’s first experience with blogging is determined by his or her experience writing and editing and publishing his or her first post. How easy is that in WordPress versus TypePad?

I’m fairly new to blogging. But not to having an online presence. I’ve had a website up and running since 1998, so I do have some experience with web editing tools, ranging from handcoding HTML in Notepad via FrontPage to lastly Dreamweaver. So I know my share of editing tools and my review of WordPress and TypePad as far as editing and managing content goes will be colored by that.

Looking at the screen shots below, bear in mind that TypePad is currently upgrading its composer, and I am still working with the old composer, because my blog is not upgraded yet, so it may look as if TypePad has many fewer options than WordPress. Compared to the new composer, the differences between WordPress and TypePad are not that big. I will get back to that as soon as I too have been upgraded by TypePad.