I can’t decide whether to use categories or tags in my WordPress posts and it’s making me question my place in the universe.
I’m drawn to Categories. They’re the traditional WordPress mechanism. They’re hierarchical, so if a post is categorized as “programming” it falls under “technology” as well. I like this structure. It’s systematic. Modern.
But the other day I was working on a post about User Interfaces and found I had no category for this topic. But how should I categorize it? Under “design” or under “programming”? The WordPress category system is single-inheritance, so I had to make a choice. Yet neither choice was correct. “User interface” thwarts such clear right-brain/left-brain delineations. It swims in the soup of ambiguity.
So I found my self drawn to tags. Tags are ad hoc, anarchic, organic. They’re egalitarian, radically democratic. They impose no power structure. Postmodern.
I’m encountering this problem a lot lately. I’m too young to be a Boomer, too old for a Millenial. I’m stuck between the old world of Science and Truth and Control and the new world of Intuition and Ambiguity and Openness.
