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By, Scott Frangos - Managing Editor, WebHelperMagazine.com

Now you can boost your categories into the Clouds — tag clouds, that is. Matt of WordPress.com (yes… the Matt — Matt Mullenweg - behind the whole WordPress application development) has announced on WordPress.com, that users of the free WordPress blog service may now elect to convert their Categories into Tags, via a new addition to the Manage menu. This feature has been available to users of the freely distributed, stand-alone version of WordPress (available at WordPress.com) since version 2.3 came out a couple of weeks ago .

“…many BlogMasters deploy a “tag cloud” that displays various keyword “tags” in different sizes relative to how many clicks they receive. So, with this new Category to Tag feature, users of WordPress.com blogs can automatically see their categories show up in tag clouds.”

Explains Matt, “Now under Manage>Import there’s a Category to Tag converter, which shows you how many times you’ve used each category and allows you to convert it to a tag so it no longer shows up as a category checkbox on your write page.” He reported that they had received a number of requests for this feature. The comments for this announcement show WordPress BlogMasters are quite grateful — one exclaiming that the new feature saved her about 6 hours of manual work.

Screenshot above shows tag cloud in right sidebar at WebFadds.com. Until the new feature was released (for WordPress.com blogs), Tag Clouds did not automatically show Category names, but instead showed tags given to individual posts in a special field for entering those tags.

Both the latest version of the freely available WordPress program (2.3, get it at WordPress.org), and the hosted version at WordPress.com, now offer the ability to add tags to posts. Why? To help surfers quickly jump to pages that list posts about their interests. To help people navigate like that, many BlogMasters deploy a “tag cloud” that displays various keyword “tags” in different sizes relative to how many clicks they receive. So, with this new Category to Tag feature, users of WordPress.com blogs can automatically see their categories show up in tag clouds.

Now for those of you new to the WordPress community, WordPress.com offers free blogs to users who sign-up there, like Google does with Blogger accounts. WordPress.com is the commercial, for-profit, company run by another company called “Automattic” (see the two t’s in there — remember, Matt started it all), and they usually contribute upgrades, fixes, enhancements, etc., back into the freely distributed program at WordPress.org and vice versa. Got that? It’s important to keep WordPress.com and WordPress.org straight — make sure you use the support forums at the correct site when you need help with new and old features alike.

About the Author: Scott Frangos is a web developer, college instructor and graphic designer. In addition to Managing Editor for WebHelperMagazine.com, is Managing Partner at WebFadds.com, a web development firm specializing in WordPress Content Management Websites. He lives in Portland, Oregon with wife and partner, Pepper, and their three dogs: Wisdom, Spirit, & Steggman.