Let’s play tag…

“blind man’s bluff” from in pastel CC-BY

Just had an interesting learning experience in the use of tags/categories and feeds! In case it helps anyone else here is what happened. Actually it was more like playing blind man’s bluff than tag…….

I had set up a category called POTCERT.  I often use categories as a way of aggregating posts into subpages which can sit under my main menu.  On my blog the subpages Current Teaching and Current Research are both categories rather than actual pages. I was going to have a similar page for my POTCERT work under Current Activity.  So that was all set up and working fine!  Then I wrote a post and tagged it potcert – no problem! WordPress was happy.  Then I submitted my feed to the class blog in the suggested form – http://clareatkins.com/wordpress/tag/potcert/feed – and nothing happened and nothing happend and nothing happened.  Realising that the problem has to be my end I went searching and finally discovered what was causing the problem…..

My category POTCERT had the slug – potcert – but my tag potcert has the slug – potcert-2.  It turns out that the syntax of the feed command is that element that follows the /tag/ or the /category/ is not the actual name but the slug – Soooo….the command needed to be http://clareatkins.com/wordpress/tag/potcert-2/feed – or http://clareatkins.com/wordpress/category/potcert/feed  - Sensible really! Of course it took me a couple of hours to figure it all out but hopefully we are now there!