How to improve browsing through archived posts in a book blog?

[Frida Fantastic]

I've been thinking about how to design a more user friendly book blog (link's at the signature). Comments from whoever has seen a book blog are welcome.

Basically, I want it easy for people to browse for reviewed books that are already archived posts. I know that I don't personally go through the posts in an archived month manually. Whenever I want to read a book, I just think "Hmm. I'm feeling something dystopian today." "What about a female heroine? I haven't read a book with a female heroine in a while." So I was thinking, what if each review post had a tag that was a funny sounding trope name, like in the style of TVtropes.org? (man, I love that website. I sink hours into it)

So I've already done some trope tagging (which you can see at a glance from the tag cloud), but a better way to get picked up by search engines is to also tag the author's name and stuff. If that's the case, then I can't have a trope-only tag cloud. So I was thinking of making a separate page with a title like "Browse by Trope" and just manually put in the links. It would be time intensive every time I post up a review, but if I were to do that now, it would be a lot easier since I only have two reviews up for now and another one coming in a few days.

Thoughts? Is it a good idea? Does it seem like I'm over doing it?

Book bloggers, how do you make it easy for people to browse through archived reviews?

[Anke Wehner]

Nothing wrong with using BOTH theme tags and the author name as tags.

To keep things neat I might run the site on Drupal rather than Wordpress, since that lets you add fields to your content types (that is, you could have several "tag clouds", one for authors, and one for tropes), or I'd look into adding that to Wordpress (which is possible, but requires enough confidence to copy, paste, and adjust code snippets).
That's assuming one's own domain. I don't know how tweakable blogs hosted on wordpress.com are, but if you could add your own theme, the latter is possible.

[Giggleton]

Can you let your blog readers tag books?

Also this is a web app that allows you to filter content released to the Xbox indie games marketplace, it's pretty neat I think and just needs user generated tags to give it that extra little something, it could easily be applied to books and probably has somewhere. If you know of a book site like this please post a link,

http://www.xboxindies.com/games/PivotDatabase.aspx

[icedtea]

Originally Posted by bashfulbanshee

Basically, I want it easy for people to browse for reviewed books that are already archived posts. I know that I don't personally go through the posts in an archived month manually.

Tagging and using wordpress' categories, which you are already doing, do that for you, although maybe not exactly in the way you want.

The tags/categories are wordpress universal, meaning the tag link goes to a listing of all wp posts (generated from both .com and .org, I believe) with that tag. For instance, click on your tag 'old time radio' in the first post.

The downside of wp.com is your category and tag links in your posts go to the universal wp link, not your own blog. For instance, your category 'Frida Reviewed' link in individual posts isn't linking to http://fridafantastic.wordpress.com/?cat=54473982 , but when people use any category or tag from your sidebar to navigate, they'll see all posts from that tag/category from your blog.

Originally Posted by bashfulbanshee

So I've already done some trope tagging (which you can see at a glance from the tag cloud), but a better way to get picked up by search engines is to also tag the author's name and stuff. If that's the case, then I can't have a trope-only tag cloud. So I was thinking of making a separate page with a title like "Browse by Trope" and just manually put in the links. It would be time intensive every time I post up a review, but if I were to do that now, it would be a lot easier since I only have two reviews up for now and another one coming in a few days.

You could put the author name as a category, and continue to tag as you have been. That way, on your sidebar, you can add both the tag cloud and a category list/cloud for easier cross reference. If you use really unique tags/categories, your posts will show up together in the universal list anyway.

With the custom menu function, you could also add a menu navigation link to those categories. You could use the category hierarchy function. Eg. Author: author name. Make Author a category (parent category). Make the author name a subcategory (child category) of Author. In the custom menu, make the Author category a nav page.

[Frida Fantastic]

@ Anke: Thanks for the tips, I'm sticking to wordpress.com for now though, so they're not really tweakable. I've got one tag cloud, so if I wanted to make divided list, I have to do it manually on a separate page with just basic html. I don't know much about site coding, but I think Wordpress.com is kind of like Apple with regards to UI. Stay with our streamlined design or get out. Hilariously enough, I am typing this on my Macbook.

@Giggleton: That's a neat idea, but the problem is that it assumes that there would be enough users that would participate. There's tagging on Amazon and Smashwords (don't know if it's readers who can tag on Smashwords), but not enough people do it to be really effective. I'll let the big sites deal with that, but for now, I'm just thinking about internal browsing in my blog with the trope tags displayed in some sort of visual form. Looking at some older mobileread posts, Ficbot was looking at a tagging system via delicious to browse through books on the free book sites: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=84646. That's an interesting global view of looking at tagging instead of looking at tags within the site.

@icedtea: Great category/tag idea. I'll consider that.

Hmm, so just to outline again the main purposes of finding a good category/tagging system:
(1) Improve search engine love. Tag similar works in pop culture (e.g. movies, comics) that it could be compared to, the author's name, so reviews of indie author's work would be found even if the searcher was looking for a more popular work. Also includes tags that improves search engine love that's specific for the blog (e.g. ebook reviews).
(2) Improve browsing by tags so readers can find archived reviews they'd be interested in, in such a way that is more enjoyable and intuitive than manual chronological archived-month post browsing or a search bar search.

If I were to tag author's names, similar works in pop culture, and other search engine love terms, it would create "noise" in the default sidebar tag cloud.

I can't say I've used tag clouds to browse through other book blogs because I generally see tag clouds that are
(1) too overwhelmingly big and of different categories (but now I understand these book blogs are doing the search engine love thing, probably not for internal navigation).
(2) too much "noise" in the form of author's names that I don't recognize, or redundant phrases.

Internal tag browsing: signal vs. noise.
Tagging an author's name for the purpose of internal navigation doesn't make sense in an indie book blog.

If you're looking for more reviews of the author, you'd already know the author's name to type it out on the search bar. I don't think I was ever compelled to look at other posts about the author just by looking at the author's name. Since indie authors aren't well known, their names alone isn't going to compel someone to look through their reviews. But I think someone would be enticed if they see genre-specific tags: steampunk, superhero, dark fantasy, or trope-tags: gadgeteer genius, girl's got moxie, arrakis seems more habitable.

Internal tag browsing: redundancy
I see a lot of book blogs that have "books" or "kindle" or "reviews" on their tags, and I was baffled by why they'd put tags on like that when it's -clearly- a book blog. I used to think that tags used were for internal browsing only, which is why I always wondered why bloggers cluttered their tag clouds. Now I understand that it's for search engine love, but it clutters the tag cloud as a form of archived post browsing, which makes me not use the tag cloud.


So going back to icedtea's category/tag suggestion, given I'm sticking with wordpress.com in the near future, here's two options I thought of:

(1) Use the sidebar tag cloud for internal browsing via trope-tags, and move all search-engine-love terms (e.g. similar works, authors) in to categories/sub categories. Also put subgenre/genre terms (dark fantasy, steampunk) on a custom side menu as a category.
(2) Use tags for everything... trope tags and search engine love terms, but the tag cloud isn't designed for internal browsing. Instead, internal browsing by trope tags would be replaced by a separate wordpress page (which I link to on the side) where I manually input each trope-tag and link to it. This separate page won't be a tag cloud, more like a massive list.

Right now, I'm leaning towards option 1. Option 2 requires more manual tweaking and would probably result in a massive list that no one would access (because it won't be on the side bar) or use (because it would be a massive list w/o any larger text to distinguish the tags that are used more often).

Thoughts? It seems kind of funny to have such a long discussion on basically, tagging and categorizing on a wordpress blog, but you know, it's all in the name of search engine love, better UI, and indie promotion and stuff.

[Frida Fantastic]

Okay. Just implemented option 1. (link at signature)

(1) Sub-genres are categories, and listed on a custom menu that I'll add more to later (e.g. dark fantasy, steampunk, etc.) as different books get reviewed. I'm probably looking at 10-15 final subgenres max.

(2) Tags are tropes and misc details. I'm focusing on only using tags can be used to describe other books, but aren't too general that it would describe too many SF books. (e.g. I don't have a "strong female characters" tag cuz there's too many of them, but I do have a "tough dames" tag for female characters who are as tough as Sigourney Weaver)

(3) Search-engine-love terms that aren't meant for internal navigation (e.g. author's name, similar pop culture works) are in the form of categories and there's no menu in sight that lists all those irrelevant details.

I changed my wordpress theme. While I don't think it's as aesthetically pleasing, there's more options for where to put widgets and stuff.

Thoughts? Is this a pretty good category/tag system that would help readers look for their next read? Do you think readers will intuitively get how to use the tags, or should the tags be more visible? If you run a book blog, how do you think this compares to your system?