Cheers For New Tagging Feature On Pika

I’ve been a happy paying customer on Pika for most of this year. The new blog host platform debuted with minimal features for wonderful simplicity, its greatest strength. Yet my most wanted feature, I think, was tags. And today it’s here! I’m excited, but also cautious, to let the tagging begin.

Why excited?

I like to organize my posts by topic (i.e. categorize). This does two things: helps me find posts I may want to link to, and it helps readers focus on what they’d like to read (zero-in the signal; skip the noise). Overall, it helps organize my blog and not have just a big chrono-pile of posts.

Why cautious?

A new feature is…more. It adds complexity. So far, Pika’s best strength and attraction has been, and remains, its simplicity. When designing how something works, one must weigh the overhead costs of utilizing more features. A new one is meant to improve the blog, but adding too many of them can become counter-productive. After experiencing the convoluted bloat of WordPress for years, I’m sensitive to this.

First impression

So far, tags look and work great on Pika. They’re well done — as minimal as can be. Even the verb, “Change tags,” is better than would be “Edit tags” because “change” has half as many syllables as “edit.” I’m serious about that. To me, it’s a sign of good design.

The tagging feature is unobtrusive. You can almost entirely miss or avoid it with little effort. The web editor remains the same writing environment — clean, simple, elegant. You only see the tag option if you click the overflow menu button. And then you only see a tagging field appear if you click, “Add tags.”

Likewise, when editing a post that has tags, you won’t see the tags by default. To edit tags, click the overflow menu and then click, “Change tags.” The tagging field appears. And once published, tags only appear at the end of post as text with a subtle background (there’s no hashtag symbol).

Summary

I’ll be trying tags on Pika and think the feature is going to work out well. I’m deciding if or how I want to show readers there are topics via tags on my home page. For now, I’m starting nice and easy and will tag new posts going forward. At some point, I’ll likely tag all posts in my archives. 

All in all, wow, I’ve been happy with Pika and now it’s looking better than ever. Will there be a place in the blogging dashboard or settings to manage tags once they grow in number? Will tags appear anywhere else? I’m sure the feature can be expanded, but will that be necessary? As always, time will tell.