Tags

Stupid day. Been adding tags to my site, and now i’m not sure why i bothered.

First tag plugin I tried was tagwire which was great except it was a pain to install and it used live cgi searches to list the entries, rather than create a static archive, which would be less server intensive.

I then discovered that there was another tags plugin which seemed to be a bit more certified by six apart, so to speak as it’s listed on their power tools pages. It’s simply called tags. Now i’m not sure but i think this might be worse than the tagwire one so now i’m a bit miffed as its taken a bit of time to get all this going and i don’t fancy taking it all off and going back to tagwire. You see what tags seems to have done is taken my keywords and made categories out of them all. So now every time I post a new entry I’ve got a pulldown with 1001 bleedin categories I don’t want. Also, it doesn’t seem to have any mechanism to order the tags page by frequency/count, in fact they aren’t even alphabetical, just the order they were created. Fat use that is. Oh and, it creates a dir for each tag, just as categories do. So what I want to know is, what happens if i carelessing have a keyword that conflicts with another folder? For instance “images” ? Dumb.

A problem both plugins had was regarding how you deal with multi-word tags. There doesn’t seem to be a unified answer to this anywhere. Flickr sticks the words together such as “moveabletype” and technorati seems to seperate the tags out so that the spaces aren’t an issue. I’ve been simply seperating everything out in one long stream, I don’t even bother to delimit them with a comma. So really they had no chance of recognising them anyway.

Ah well, here’s my pretty tag page.

UPDATE:
I’ve added some script to snazz it up cloud style. It isn’t perfect and there’s some design issues for sure. But it’s getting there!

This is the MT html

<ul id="taglist" class="listoflinks">
   <MTTags sort_by="count" sort_order="descend" lastn="40">
      <li title="<$MTTagCount$>">
         <a style="color:#00FF00" href="<MTTagArchiveLink>"><MTTagName></a>
         <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/<MTTagName>" rel="TAG"
title="TAG:<MTTagName>"><img class="inline"  width=16 height=16
src="/images/techiconsmall.png" /></a> </li>
   </MTTags>
</ul>

And this is the script… (don’t laugh, I know its messy… my code always is)

<script>
   var objli;
   var obja;
   var lichildren;
   var obj = document.getElementById("taglist");
   var children = obj.childNodes;
   var nNum, szNum, nInvNum, nTextNum, szGreen;

   for(var i=0; i < children.length; i++) {
      objli = children[i];
      if(objli.tagName == "LI")
      {   lichildren = objli.childNodes;
         obja = lichildren[1];
         nNum = objli.title;
         if(nNum > 20) nNum = 20;
         nInvNum = 99 - (nNum * 6) - 5;
         szNum = nInvNum.toString();
         if(nNum == 1) {
            szGreen = "FF";
         } else {
            szGreen = "BB";
         }
         obja.style.color = "#" + szNum + szGreen + szNum;
         nTextNum = nNum * 3;
         if(nTextNum <  nTextNum = 10;
                        if(nTextNum > 30) nTextNum = 30;
         szNum = nTextNum.toString();
         obja.style.fontSize = szNum + "pt";
      }
   }

</script>

If yer mad and you want to use it, go ahead I guess.

UPDATE AGAIN:
I’m still playing.