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.

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 ↩

I realized something today: I’ve been tagging slick site layouts as user interface inspiration. My thinking has shifted from thinking about user interfaces as buttons and boxes, to thinking of it as how information is presented: the aesthetics, the flow, and the grokability. Interfaces aren’t just facades for tools, but a face for the flow of information between people via the machine.

A great business card idea: using a tag cloud on the back side.

Tags are one of two things that make web tools better than client-side applications (the other being the possibilities in social linking). But for tags to really stick, they need to do more than group things together. Tags need to be shared between people, which makes the things they tag more useful. Tags also need to somehow underscore the essence of the grouping, so the groups themselves can be compared and related. This is where the power of tags really shines.

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.

Vista’s last mile, a report on the time crunch leading up to the impending release. The article has a few tidbits on how Vista is being tested:

With each day’s build, Microsoft is running a battery of automated tests against around 1,000 of the leading software programs. It has written 750,000 lines of code just to create the test patterns, which take 355 servers the better part of the day to run.

Check out Gnome’s newest photo management tool, F-spot. It’s written in C#/GTK# with Mono, and is easy to use. It imported 15k of photos in just a few minutes, making it fun/easy/quick to browse, tag, edit, and upload the shots to Flickr. The Free tools just keep on getting better and better.

Here’s a plugin to automatically close XML/HTML tags in Vim, and some general Vim HTML/XML tools and mappings.

A Flickr tagging game, in the spirit of the new Google image tagging game. Isn’t tagging fun?