Tag: tagging

Found a Tag Cloud Plugin for WordPress

Ashley Bischoff7 Comments

I’ve been able to use more specific categories with my posts since installing the Cat2Tag plugin for WordPress. In short, it adds a text field below the textarea on the “Write Post” page where you can enter a comma-separated list of categories for the post. And, if a category doesn’t already exist, it’s automatically created for you.

One benefit to having more specific categories is more relevant categorization within Technorati. Each post in Technorati is listed by its tags and it assigns those tags based on the categories into which the post was placed. (Or, from the technical perspective, Technorati reads your RSS and extracts the categories from there.)

Anyhow, Cat2Tag has been working nicely; the only downside is that a regular list of categories could be a bit on the lengthy side. So, I’ve made use of Christoph Wimmer’s Heat Map Plugin for WordPress which you can see in the sidebar. The effect, also called a tag cloud, lists the categories sequentially but assigns font sizes based on the number of posts in each category.

I'm pleased with how the Heat Map Plugin worked out and Wimmer was thorough in his implementation. For one thing, rather than arbitrarily using pixel-based font-sizes, one of the function's parameters is a font-size unit — so, you can have it specify the sizing in ems, percentages, pts, or even inches.

And, as is common for WordPress plugins which “get data from the database and output it”, the function also allows you to specify code to insert before and after each link; so, if you set that to <li> and </li>, you can have a semantic unordered list (for those who aren't using a visual web browser).

I’ve Setup a Del.icio.us Account

Ashley Bischoff4 Comments

You may have heard about the social bookmarking site del.icio.us but, if not, you wouldn’t be the only one — I only wrapped my head around it a couple weeks ago. As you may have guessed, the basic idea is that you can store all your bookmarks on a centralized website and assign them keywords or “tags” as they’re called in del.icio.us-land.

Then, all the links and usernames are linked together :). So, you can:

  • ... click on one of that tags which you've given a URI (say “CSS”) and see all the other sites with that tag.
  • ... click on a link and see who else bookmarked it
  • ... click on a link and see what tags other people gave it

But, other than linking everything together, del.icio.us is fully RSS-capable. A quick primer on RSS, in case you hadn’t heard of it: RSS allows subscriptions to websites and with an RSS reader (such as the web-based Bloglines), you get a notification when that site/blog is updated.

So, you could “subscribe” to a tag if you wanted to (such as “steelers”) and you’d receive a notice in your RSS reader every time someone tagged a link with that word. Or, each user’s account is also RSS-readable, so you could subscribe to subscribe to (say) John Smith’s account (or my account) and see each link that he added.

Of course, you could subscribe to your friends’ accounts and view links as they bookmark them. Or, you could follow a tag for one of the links which you added to del.icio.us, see who else bookmarked it, and then subscribe to his/her links — for instance, if you like motorcycles, could click on one of your links which had the tag “motorcycles” and then click through to one of the accounts of someone else that bookmarked that link. And, maybe you'd find some useful links of interest on that guy's page (even if he didn’t tag them with “motorcycles”).

As I wrote this entry, I also looked around to see if anyone else had given a straightforward explanation of the del.icio.us concept. I found this thread at Ask.MetaFilter and there, gwint lists quite a few advantages of del.icio.us in one of his posts, but I didn’t want to paste all of that here without his permission.

There were also several recommendations in that thread for this article entitled “Us.ef.ul — A beginner’s guide to The Next Big Thing” and I would have quoted a few bits of that but that article ends up rendering about 2000 pixels wide in my browser and I couldn't really make my way through it. (Then again, I’m running the Firefox build from two days ago, so the odd layout may not necessarily be the authors fault.)

At any rate, I’d recommend giving del.icio.us a try. For what it’s worth, my account is “handcoding” there and there are several Firefox/del.icio.us integration tools (in addition to a del.icio.us-supplied bookmarklet which works just fine as well).