First, I wrote a PHP class for passing content to Open Calais and getting back tags. Then, a WordPress plugin for tagging posts as you write them. Now, taking it one step further again, here’s a plugin for automatic tagging of your post archives.

I tried tagging for a while last year, but wasn’t consistent in my choice of tags or in tagging every post at all. That made the whole system not worth the work, so I removed the plugins I used to add tags in the first place. Now tags are as much a part of WordPress as categories, and I have almost 170 posts not tagged at all. I could edit every one and add them, manually or with the plugin, but that would take a lot of time. Instead, I wrote a plugin which goes through my entire archive of posts, sends the post title and content over to Calais and adds any tags it finds. If there were already tags on the post, only new ones found would be added.

It produces a pretty decent tag cloud, doesn’t it?