Step 1 - Remove a lot of the tags/categories that were cluttering up the list before: done.
Next is going back through all the older posts and re-categorizing them; that will be the hard part.
There are a whole bunch of cosmetic changes that I’d like to do to, depending on how much time I want to spend on it.
I’ve got this plugin I wrote a while ago that automatically tags my posts as I type them if the post contains keywords related to the tags (no, I haven’t released this one for the public yet).
After posting that last article about WM5, and then looking at the “tag cloud” above, I realized I need to cut way back on the number of tags I’m using, and also finish going back and tagging old posts so that it’s somewhat useful.
are now up in my Flickr photos, tagged with “Fall Drive” & 2005.
Yes, that is my hand in the picture, taken on my cell phone. I did this to give an approximate size perspective to the pictures, and remember my hand is kind of big.
After we were tossing some rocks around in the riverbed, we noticed this spider crawling around, apparently trying to escape being squished (although if Kristi had anything to say about it, it still would have been).
There are more pictures of the spider as well as the other ones that I took from my cell phone, under the tags mentioned above (link to photos tagged with both “Fall Drive” and 2005).
Some pictures are up. (No, not the tarantula yet, sorry). This is a link to all the photos tagged with “Fall Drive”, the recent ones are also tagged with “2005″, but I don’t know if Flickr has a link structure for filtering on two tags at once (suggestions, anyone?), so oh well. I know, I could make a “set”, but I don’t really want to go through that much trouble.
UPDATE: Nevermind, I figured out the multiple tag link (for photos tagged with both “Fall Drive” AND “2005″).
Just wanted to do a quick post about the new spam system I am using: Spam Karma 2. It’s been a while since I looked around at spam plugins, but it was getting pretty bad for a while, and since I haven’t had much time to work on the blog dev stuff that I want to, I decided to try out this one that I had seen recommended in various places.
I’m still tweaking the settings and working everything out, but it seems pretty good right now, and it is catching 100% of the spam at the moment (which the WPBlacklist plugin I was using before was obviously missing). Spam Karma has a lot of interesting details about it which I’ll perhaps expand upon later, but what I like about it most is that it combines mulitple strategies for detecting whether a particular comment is spam, and assigns “karma” points (positive or negative) to a given comment depending on how it fares against all the different filters.
One of the many options it’s using is doing something like I was doing with my original spam plugin that I wrote myself: putting encrypted data in the form that is then checked on the server when the comment is posted, to verify that it was posted from the form that the user just loaded. Obviously they do this differently than I did, so my tagboard was not compatible with this approach, and this is why all the tags were getting moderated after I turned it back on. Until I fix it, I’m just going to leave the tagboard disabled (I never really liked tagboards too much anyway).
Another interesting aspect of it is that Dan tried to submit several tags which were getting blocked because of the issue mentioned above, but then after a number of failed comment attempts (by the same person/IP within a given window of time) it automatically added his IP and his domain (from the URL field) to the blacklist, so that even when he tried to comment in a normal post he couldn’t. I thought that was pretty cool.
Someday I need to go back and finish tagging my old posts, so that the tag cloud above is accurate.
I’ve adapted the admin UI for tagging posts from the cat2tag plugin Dan mentioned earlier, as well as adding my own features, including support for adding tags on the fly that contain spaces, as well as auto-tagging. By this I mean that as I am typing (or if I open an old post for editing), the plugin will continually scan the text and automatically add any tags that are found in the text or title of the post.
This will make it very easy to go back and update older posts now, since I just have to open then save, since the post will automatically be scanned for tag matches, and I would just need to click to add one that isn’t specifically spelled out in the post, or type a new one quickly.
I’m now using the WordPress categories as tags, and I made a plugin to do a Flickr-like weighted tag link section instead of my old categories links. Now I just have to go back and update all the old posts. I’ve gotten through the most recent 100 so far - only 450 more to go!
See the top of this page and the sidebar for examples (same plugin); I haven’t decided how I want to style them or where to put them yet.
I like the idea of tags much more than hierarchal “categories”, but in WordPress, the out of the box categories already work more like “tags” than “categories” anyway, so I figured it is better to build on top of that. Plus, there’s already an admin interface for maintaining them, etc. - and after looking at other solutions for this, I decided there’s really no “tag” functionality that the WP categories can’t accommodate, with a little plugin code on top of them.
Thanks to Dan, I am now a proud owner of a Flickr Pro account. Clicking on the “Photo Gallery” link at the top of the sidebar will now take you to my Flickr tags page, instead of the old Gallery site. I have to say that even though I have only been using it for two days, Flickr is miles ahead of Gallery (at least on the Admin interface, uploading pics, etc.)
