Show Tags in a Blog Grid

Hi there.

I’ve been using this post to implement tags on a blog grid by adding:

                $cats = get_the_tag_list('<span>Tags: ',', ','</span>', $the_id);

                if(!empty($cats))
                {
                    $excerpt = '<span class="blog-categories minor-meta">'.__('in','avia_framework')." ";
                    $excerpt .= $cats;
                    $excerpt .= '</span>';
                }

To the postslider.php file after the line

$output .= !empty($excerpt) ? "<div class='slide-entry-excerpt entry-content' $markup>".$excerpt."</div>" : "";

Can’t see to get the tags to display though.

Any thoughts would be useful.
Thanks
Richard