Like many sites out ther I have added tags to Eclectic Echoes through the excellent WordPress plugin Ultimate Tag Warrior. Not especially ground-breaking news, no doubt, but one of the things that I do really like about the implementation in Ultimate Tag Warrior is that I can define tag synonyms in the backend. This is one area where I think many of the tag implementations such as at Flickr fall a bit short of the mark. Of course at sites like Flickr it would be hard to implement synonyms well because different people have vastly different vocabularies dependant on culture, experience, context, etc.
Here in a controlled environment though the use of synonyms makes tags even more powerful for me. For instance I have a number of Osprey photos and related entries here on Eclectic Echoes. I have tried to be consistant with tagging them all with the tags “osprey”, “raptor”, “bird” and “Pandion+halieatus” (the last being the binomial scientific name of the Osprey). While I have tried, I have often failed to tag them consistently. With synonyms though I have set “pandion+halieatus” and “osprey” to be synonyms, ensuring that any tag search for one will return all the relevant entries tagged with either tag. I still have to work on being more deliberate in taggin entries well as even synonyms doesn’t help if entries aren’t tagged at all or the case of “raptor” or “bird” above. All osprey are birds, but not all birds are osprey, type of thing.
At any rate, I am continuing to work on tagging some older entries a bit at a time, and will put a tag search function in here in the near future, but at this point by clicking one of the tags you can get all entries with that tag easily. Going to eclecticechoes.com/tag/johann/ for instance will bring up all entries tagged with “johann”. I will probably also add links to Technorati, del.icio.us and flickr from the tag archive pages. I say probably, mainly because many tags have questionable carry through to those services:
Osprey: Locally, at Technorati, at del.icio.us and at flickr.
In this particular case the only one that really works (connects to related subject matter) is flickr, Technorati and del.icio.us have more links about the aircraft (civilian and the Navy V-22), backpacks and peer to peer software than the bird.
Monday, February 14, 2005
Well that was entirely too painless!
It actually only took about 8 minutes to install WP and then import all the old entries. Sweet.
I took some time yesterday and today looking through a variety of plug-ins, tweaks and options for WP. I have installed a few plug-ins — although I have not modified the index to implement all of them. Right now I plan on using:
- Adhesive to enable sticky posts — hopefully on a category by category basis.
- Breadcrumb Navigation to add the classic
Home > Category > You Are Here functions.
- Technorati Tags — I’m not sure how much I will use these. I have questions on the long term utility of folksonomies. They are definitely easier for most people to implement than taxonomies or ontologies (each a marked step more structured and constrained than the previous), but in the long term how useful will they prove considering the (almost ?) complete lack of structure? They are however interesting to watch emerging, and may lead eventually into an adaptive core taxonomy and ontology which I believe would be highly useful yet remain easy to use.
- WP-CC which automatically inserts my chosen Creative Commons license both in the meta and visible page.
- WP Filters Manager to control the default and added filters. I hoped this one would allow me to remove the
rel="nofollow" from the comments section without having to edit the actual core files. Alas, while it did remove it from any links in the body of the comments, it did not allow me to remove the nofollow from comment author’s emails. Not a failing of the plugin. A little looking around and I found a patch to correct this. The patch removes the hardcoded nofollows in and replaces them with the — already provided — filter. Now the Filter Manager can turn it on and off.
I also have the stock plug-ins which come with 1.5 — Markdown, Staticize Reloaded, and Textile 1.
After an initial spin around and looking at some of the tweaks and such out there, I really like WordPress. Of course I do have some minor issues, but they are just that — minor.
I would like to see more flexibility in implementing the nofollow tag among other things. I don’t believe rel="nofollow" is bad or will break the net, but at the same time I am seeing many situations where websites are applying nofollow to every external link on the site. Many people are nollowing their blogrolls, all the links in their posts — even when they are simultaneously recommending the link in the text of the post — one site even had some internal links nofollowed! I’d like to see some of the same comment moderation systems applied to the nofollow tag. Apply nofollow to new comments and the author url (if given), unless the same author has previously been approved in a different comment, or is a logged in user of a certain level. Then in the comment moderation panel allow not only the approval of comments but an option to remove the nofollow tags as well. Selective, intelligent, subtle use of the nofollow tag instead of trying to drop a nuke on the building next door.
