I’m a tagging freak. I believe tags are the best way to help organize data into miscellaneous piles of information. It gives us a non-hierarchical (that isn’t a word, is it?) way that we can search for things later. Yes, I’ve read Dave Weinberger‘s book Everthing is Miscellaneous. I told you; tagging freak.

Apple has, in their own way, provided support for tagging in Mac OS X. They have a field in their metadata for files called “Spotlight comments”. Or, ‘the words you’d like to use to search for this file using Spotlight’. So if I have a document that, for whatever reason, is about my cats Pickles and Pookers but – somehow – does not mention them inside of the file by name or in the filename itself, I can add “Pickles Pookers” to the Spotlight comments area and presto! – I can search Spotlight for either of their names and find the file.

Magic.

Tags, on the other hand, adds a certain UI to this process that I think Apple should have done from the very beginning. From inside of any Applescript-enabled application (which is a lot of applications) you can invoke a UI to help you add some tags to that file. You can do this in Mail.app, Finder, inside of iPhoto, and even on bookmarks within Safari. Then, you can do specific searches in Spotlight later for those tags. The screencast on the home page for Tags does a good job of explaining what the application does and what it allows you to accomplish.

Source: Tags | Overview.

The new Docs UI

Google announced a redesign of the main Google Docs dashboard that gives you quick access to all of your documents and spreadsheets that you have on Google Docs. In many ways this new interface is much better than the old one – except that Google has seemingly taken tags, or labels (see this post for more about labels), and turned them into folders?

I am of the firm belief that tagging is far superior to folders. Even though in Google’s use on Docs they seem to be handled as being one in the same, it is that the interface leads users to adding folders instead of using tags. What does this mean? This means that people will begin to constrain their tagging into a rigid set of folders instead of having the freedom that tagging offers. I think we’ll start to see folder structures like Business, Personal, Family, etc. begin to emerge where before we may have seen tags that were much more miscellaneous than that.

In my opinion this is a leap backwards. Or, perhaps – one step forward and two steps back.

For quite awhile now (actually, probably since I moved everything to this domain), I’ve been tagging my posts with keywords that in some way describe the content of the post I had just written. This serves many purposes – the first and most important of which is that each post becomes inherently more searchable. The second is that content indexing services like Google and Technorati will index your content much more efficiently, making it much easier for those looking for it to find it. The benefits are obvious then right? Accessible content and increased exposure. A win-win.

When I first set out to add the ability to tag posts on this site, I had a few specific requirements. The most notable requirement was that I needed to be able to tag my posts quickly and from an external application. The first challenge to do that would be to find an application that works seamlessly with WordPress in this regard. Fat chance. Most weblog posting applications that do “play nice” with WordPress do a fairly poor job of interacting with WordPress above the normal post/edit activities. I think I’ll write more on this subject in the future.

What I ended up using was Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW), a WordPress plugin, that adds the ability to tag your posts in WordPress. It also fit my main requirement of being able to add tags to posts quickly and via an external application. The way UTW handles this by allowing me to add a simple text string to the end of my posts (and it can even extrapolate tags from within the post content itself) when I write them in MarsEdit. Beautiful.

Snag! The snag I’m referring to came when I tried to have UTW use a specific permalink structure. I desired to have /keyword/TAGHERE/ as my permalinks for tag-specific searches. But since my post permalinks are already /category/post-name/ there was an immediate conflict. WordPress would determine /keyword/ as the category and /TAGHERE/ as the post name, which would throw a 404 error every time. There have been attempts to fix this, but to no avail yet. I might add that this is not a bug in UTW nor in WordPress, just a URL compatibility issue – and is only present in the latest versions of WordPress.

Since I was unable to resolve this issue, and I really desired to have nice looking URLs for my keywords, I hid the fact that I was tagging posts for far too long. How did I do this? Well, quite simply really. I still wanted the benefits of having the keywords, but I just didn’t want to show them so I had a DIV and it’s style was simply display: none;. Well, I’ve finally given into the ugly URLs (index.php?tag=TAGHERE), and have made the keywords visible on each post of this site. Most posts are tagged, but not all, so someday I’ll take the time to rip through my archives and update each post.

Also of note is a slightly refreshed home page. So, enjoy the keyword verticals, and have a great Friday.

[tags]cdevroe.com, refresh, tags, keywords, ultimate tag warrior, utw, wordpress, marsedit, taxonomy[/tags]