I mentioned a while back, as part of resurrecting this blog, the possibility of moving old blog entries (from October 2000 until March 2007) to WordPress. Having re-entered the old posts from 2007 on, I figured I might as well have the old posts here, as well. I’ll probably keep the old diary format on the site, but it’s nice to have all my blog writings in a single place.

Don’t get me wrong, I like WordPress. A lot. But it has some annoying quirks. One of which has to do with the UI for assigning categories and tags to posts. In the WordPress user interface, the controls for adding categories and tags are shown on the “Post” tab when editing a post. They’re supposed to be shown below where one adds the author, date, and a few other post-related items. Unfortunately, they’re not always shown.

Sometimes, perhaps most of the time, they’re shown when I select “Add New Post” from the list of blog posts. They’re also shown sometimes, very rarely, if I select “Add New Post” from the post-publishing page. In the cases when they’re not shown, sometimes (again, very rarely), doing a hard refresh (Ctrl+F5) of the page will cause them to be shown. Sometimes I get the Tags, but not the Categories. Oddly, I can’t recall seeing the Categories controls without the Tags controls.

The problem, of course, is “sometimes.” The only reliable way I know of to show the Categories and Tags controls is to do the following:

1. Create a new post.
2. Add the post title.
3. Save the post as a draft.
4. Go back to the list of posts.
5. Click to edit the post that you just created.
6. The Categories and Tags controls are now displayed in the “Post” tab.

I suspect the problem is that an AJAX request is timing out somewhere, although I can’t explain why it never seems to time out when I’m editing a previously-saved post.

WordPress gives the author a second chance to add tags and categories. When I click on the Publish button, it does some pre-publish checks and gives the opportunity to change some things. Or, if configured, to remind about Categories and Tags. At least that’s what it’s supposed to do. And it does. Rarely.

It’s way too much trouble. At some point I got tired of having to make that round trip. I don’t know if it’s WordPress or my hosting provider that’s the problem. At this point I don’t really care. I just won’t tag my blog entries at this time. Which is okay. It turns out that coming up with a good set of categories is difficult. And without careful thought, all a tag cloud does is obscure things. Surprise: taxonomy is hard. I’ll get all the blog entries converted to WordPress and then I’ll worry about taxonomy.