Making Gling Work For You: Part Two

Hello again, and welcome to part two of Making Gling Work for You! It’s time to grab your flashlight and do a little exploring.

This week is all about tags and how to use them. Now, I know this was not listed in the features overview (Part One), but it is a super important feature, and needs explaining.

Tags

Tags are the very basis of helping Gling to operate smoothly and finding what you need. They are also necessary for getting your words heard and your recipes seen. In essence, they are what make Gling work for you.

Anytime you add a recipe, food or location to Gling, there is a box to add tags. This helpful little device is like a road-sign for information. Adding the right tags is very simple if you know what to keep in mind.

When deciding what tags to add, try to imagine what people will use your information for. For instance, pancakes are a breakfast food, so you would want to list ‘breakfast’ as one of your tags. That way, someone looking for great breakfasts can find your recipe by using the tag cloud (below).

Another great thing to add for tags is certain dietary needs. If you add a food or a recipe that is dairy-free, tag it that way as well.

For locations, tags can include the city the location is found in. You can also add the type of business it is. List restaurants as ‘fine dining’ or ‘casual dining’. Bakeries are often ‘coffee shops’ as well.

Make your tags as clear as possible, as if you were giving directions to a friend.

To enter tags, type each one in and separate them with a comma and a space. (i.e. The tags for this article will be: Making Gling Work For You, Gling User Guide, Tags, Searching on Gling, Tag Cloud)

Tag Cloud

This is the main area where we see the need for tags. When you click on the icons for recipes or food the screen will fill with information. The selections shown are the most recent entries. If you look to the right (under the rating system) you will find the tag cloud.

The tag cloud is a listing of the most popular tags on Gling. They are listed in alphabetical order so they’re easy to look through. You should notice that some tags are big and some are teeny tiny. The size of the print for each tag shows how popular it is, the bigger the print, the more that tag is used. By looking at the tag cloud, I can tell you that Bean Flour is a tag that is used quite often on the site.

Here’s the cool part. By clicking on a tag, you launch a full scale search for information. Let’s go back to our pancakes for an example:

In the recipes section, I decide that it is too much work to look through every recipe to find a yummy breakfast for my family (this is true of my search habits :). So, I find ‘breakfast’ in the tag cloud and click it. My screen soon reveals to me not only 27 different recipes, but also photos, bookmarks, blog posts and tribes that have to do with breakfast. (at this point, I have also easily located your pancakes since we tagged them appropriately in the first part of this article)

That’s all the exploring we have for today! I know we’re still on the doorstep, but never fear! I’ll have more for you next week. Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is this user guide. Make sure you have fresh batteries in your flashlight for next week when we explore more of what Gling has to offer.