Welcome to jkg3.com

Okay, what is a tag? a tag is, a way of marking up the content of a blog post or page to enable services like technorati to spider them and sort them. You might ask why this is different to a normal search engine. Here is why:

A normal search engine only “spiders” your site for new content every few weeks at most. With blogs and other regularly updated content this means there couple be 10 or more posts on the site before a traditional search engine would spider them, this mean that the search engines index would be come old very quickly. So how was this solved?

This was solved with a system known as “pinging”, pings have been used online for a while to check connection (for an example, on windows to go start > run > type cmd into the box, then when the command window opens type something like “ping google.com” this will then ping google) these pings are slightly different (they contain different types of data in something called XML-RPC and this ping alerts the search engine or ping service to your update.

Now we know how pinging works i can start to explain about tags. The tags proper name is a rel-tag microformat this is a microformat which is used so show the relationship of content to other content.

Rel-tags can also be used to show the relationship on links (for example, I can link to my own website and rel-tag it with “me” to show that the relationship my relationship to that link is that it is me!) In this way, when I add a tag link my journal i use the rel=“tag” attribute which tells services when they I ping them what sort of information i have on my site.

To get tag onto this site was quite an effort, but i will save that for another post another day!