More features, more speed & more fun using tags and archives.
This release contains a grand redesign of the
BlogArchive and
adds tagging of BlogEntries in addition to the category system.
The
archive may be used in four modes now that differ in the way the
data is made accessible.
- CHRON mode: This is the typical way of listing entries chronologically.
- CAT mode: Browse the archive the way you divided your blog into categories.
- TAG mode: Browse the archive by listing blog entries being tagged the same way
- LEX mode: Explore your blog by analyzing most frequently used words.
The CAT, TAG and LEX modes display categories tags and words using
tag clouds well
known in Bloggistan.
To make that clear, I am not the inventor of this kind of
archive concept. The ideas go back to Michael Heilmann, Jonas Rabbe and Arnaud Froment
and their WordPress plugins
Super Archive and
Extended Live Archive. See the
archive of the Binary Bonsai site for example. Note -- however -- that these use Ajax extensively. The Binary Bonsai one does not work with
my
favorite browser. So the archive function of the BlogPlugin does not use Ajax though the response feeling is quite similar, IMHO, due to
the recent speed improvements of the DBCachePlugin. Note also, that the LEX mode
is a thing that at least for me was a quite natural feature to add. Rendering tag clouds
of all the words you wrote is at least interesting. There's an option that allows you to
limit the
minimum number of times a word must occur to be included in the tag cloud so that
you only get a cloud of the words you use rather frequent. Kind of characterization of
your writing style or whatever.
Next feature added in 0.6 is
tagging. This adds a free form text field, BlogTag, where you
can insert any tag. Below that in the edit form, there is a list of all ``known tags'' collected from all blog entries.
So the set of tags is defined bottom up -- not as for the SubjectCategories predefined top down. Controlling the set of all BlogTags is not
quite straight-forward right now as you could easily lose sight of them. But before I figured
out how to work bottom-up in a more controlled way things are as they are rand
you can start tagging your old blog entries right away.
Last not least, the recent addition of the DBSTATS tag to the DBCachePlugin adds
considerable
speed to the front pages where there have been some ugly nested
searches in the sidebar where categories and the postings per month where summarized.
What was a couple of nested queries is a simple application of the DBSTATS feature now.
There is as I mentioned still room for improvement of these new features: the BlogArchive
topic should be cleaned up by eliminating redundant parts and made more modular using
some new TopicFunctions. The tagging experience should be made a little more fool-prove. The new
TWiki:Plugins/TagMePlugin really looks interesting being released on
twiki.org recently. This one adds tags out-of-band, that is it does not store them
into the topic's meta data but in a separate file. Thus tagging
can be done without an edit-save cycle. Nice. But actually I
like the things to
be stored in TWikiForms. That gets cached by the DBCachePlugin which is a lot faster
and more consistent with the rest of the design of this blogging TWikiApplication.
The only advantage of the TagMePlugin is the ease with which content can be tagged
in a collaborative way which is great for wikis in general.
