[Blog] Proposal: Add categorical-tags to blogs for better navigation

[JigaoLuo]

Hi datafusion team,

First, thank you for consistently publishing high-quality blogs! I appreciate the effort behind them.

Feedback & Suggestions:
While the content is excellent, navigating the blogs can be challenging due to no indexing. It takes time to skim through release notes to find specific content topics. It would be much nicer if we could prune(filter) blogs using their tag metadata.

Example:
The DuckDB blog (news) uses a tagging navigation that works well. For instance, there are 6 tags like: using-duckdb, benchmarks, deepdive, extensions, releases,
These tags help readers quickly filter content by interest, whether they’re looking for how-to guides, technical deep dives, or release updates.

[alamb]

Thanks @JigaoLuo -- this is a great idea -- if you are willing to help out, maybe you can make a PR https://github.com/apache/datafusion-site to add them?

You can see there are categories for some of the posts

• https://github.com/apache/datafusion-site/blame/a5520d5113d75b07ec7480666c6a9354059ce4d4/content/blog/2022-10-28-ballista-0.9.0.md#L6

Maybe we just need to update pelican to display them 🤔

[alamb]

I think we need to do two things as two separate PRs

1. Figure out how to get the tags to render with the pelican sie generator
2. Add additional relevant tags to existing blog posts

[JigaoLuo]

Thanks for moving this ticket. I will check the two steps you suggested.

[alamb]

I may also try to use an AI agent to try this

[JigaoLuo]

I spent ~an hour on this today. I don’t think this is a configuration issue - the original template lacks sidebar support, which we need.

Thankfully, there are other Pelican themes with sidebar support that we can reuse. I recommend organizing blogs into category pages (e.g., /blog/performance/, /blog/release/), each displaying posts that belong to a single selected category. We should discuss whether creating these category pages is necessary.

Add additional relevant tags to existing blog posts

Tags could also be included in a sidebar.

[alamb]

Thank you for the investigation @JigaoLuo -- sidebar / making the blogs look nicer would be great