WordPress’s tagging feature is good, but it lacks mass-editing. Healthy taxonomies need regular maintenance too, so I went hunting through tag plugins compatible with 2.5.1. I found Simple-tags, which is proving handy for nudging around the tags on my 2,000 or so posts.

Useful features:

• Bulk tag delete and rename, including tags listed by popularity
• Tag grouping, which allows you to add a tag that encompasses other tags
• Auto-tagging, on post-save or en-mass

While it takes some time to clean up a tag space, it’s at least possible now.

A few¹ people² inspired³ me to refresh my site this week, after a few months of poorly focused layout changes. I had been trying to add icons and style to each type of post in my tumblelog, but it wasn’t working⁴. So I’ve nixed most of different tumble styles, waxed on the contrast, inserted more whitespace, and added Gruber-licious-styled wp-footnotes⁵⁶.

There’s one outstanding bug, though: the hover opacity isn’t working in Safari⁷. Anyone have any ideas?

1. I can never remember Steve’s new site name ↩
2. PK should post again ↩
3. Allen also reminded me of the footnote plugin ↩
4. Thanks Newb ↩
5. Again, thanks Allen ↩
6. And yes, I’m over using footnotes in this post ↩
7. But fine in IE/Firefox ↩

I’ve added a new theme for those of you browsing the site with an iPhone or iPod Touch. It’s based on Joe Hewitt’s iUI library, with some WordPress plugin magic.

I upgraded to Wordpress 2.3 today, which broke a few of my hacked plugins. The code broke as it relied on the old category system, which was replaced by a new, more flexible, taxonomy system. The new schema is well designed too, and the new queries are much cleaner as a result. Here’s an example of how to get a list of categories¹:

SELECT *
    FROM wp_terms AS t 
JOIN wp_term_taxonomy AS tx 
    ON t.term_id = tx.term_id 
JOIN wp_term_relationships AS tr 
    ON tr.term_taxonomy_id = tx.term_taxonomy_id 
WHERE taxonomy = 'category' 
GROUP BY t.term_id
ORDER BY count DESC, t.term_id;

The new taxonomy approach introduces the possibility of displaying better clusters of categories, by including tags in the mix. It also cleans up the SQL from the previous releases with simpler ways of getting count and a clearer relationship mechanism. The table design is clean too, a big improvement over past schemas.

1. Of course, you would use the public category/taxonomy APIs if this was all you needed ↩

Here’s Mozilla’s guide for creating search extensions for Firefox. I’ve been meaning to make one of these for our internal websites.

A lightweight Firebug plugin for browsers other than Firefox.

A stickies widget plugin for Rails. Lets you display notes/errors/etc. in a consistent way.

NutritionData.com has a nifty Firefox search plugin to search foods in their database. Very handy.

The official set of online Rails manuals, including a Rails cookbook and a good guide on Rail’s URL routing/rewriting. The docs for a user login plugin and an overview of plugins in general.

I love the concept of del.icio.us, but because it’s separate from the browser it’s a pain to use. Enter the del.icio.us Firefox plugin, which replaces Firefox’s weak bookmark tool with taglicious zen. Most excellent.