Tag clouds not being tag clouds //at 19:57 //by abe

I recently stumbled over two nice things just looking like a very impressive tag cloud without being one.

The first thing is a screenshot of a drugstore.com newsletter which seemed to make some bloggers to scent a marketing conspiracy against bloggers since bloggers tend to jump on everything looking like a tag cloud. (Well, doesn’t this posting prove this theory? ;-)

The second thing is semantically closer to a tag cloud: a search term cloud. Well, if that isn’t an idea for a new Blosxom plugin? ;-)

Tagging with Technorati style in pure Blosxom //at 02:22 //by abe

Short summary: I can’t stay away from coding Blosxom plugins. Perl rules. PHP sucks. ;-)

• New version 0.04 of the tagging plugin, supporting Technorati style tag links to many resources.
• New add-on plugin pathbasedtagging to the plugin tagging, implementing Technorati style tag links in pure Blosxom without any help from Apache’s mod_rewrite.
• New plugin dept offering Slashdot like “dept.” lines for Blosxom postings.

Supporting Technorati style tag URLs

After releasing the last version of my Blosxom plugin tagging, I noticed that Technorati only seems to like URLs ending in “/tagname” but not ending in “=tagname” (as they do if you use classic query strings instead of the path info), even if the a tag has a rel="tag" attribute. And not only I noticed this but also some other users of the plugin. (Although I do wonder how Furl made it to a Technorati partner with URLs like www.furl.net/furled.jsp?topic=tags…)

So I somehow had to change the syntax style for my tags. This wasn’t very hard for the links, but I wanted them to still link to my blog and not to Technorati, Flickr, Wikipedia or any other external resource.

Implementing Technorati style tag URLs

The obviously easiest solution for someone who’s using and administrating Apache web servers for nearly ten years now was to use some mod_voodoo—eh—mod_rewrite:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/tags/(.*)$ /cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi?-tags=$1 [PT]

That way I could use Technorati style tags and had a well performing solution. But somehow this solution wasn’t that satisfying since it wasn’t pure Blosxom and therefore had some dependency including access to some Apache config file. (Even if the config file was called .htaccess. ;-)

A pure Blosxom solution

A few days ago I somehow noticed that in general a special behaviour on some URLs could also be implemented using Blosxom’s API. Using the entries function to modify the Blosxom internal path itself before Blosxom or e.g. the entries_index runs but not returning any hashes, allows to have some path like URLs not being treated as a path by Blosxom.

Unfortunately this couldn’t be incorporated into the tagging plugin itself, since plugins doing such path interpreting voodoo needs to be ran before any plugin supplying an entries function runs. But the tagging plugin must run after such a plugin. So I created the small add-on plugin pathbasedtagging which is solely thought for use together with the tagging plugin (but may have other, yet unknown purposes).

And since I got asked if they could use the tagging plugin to link to external tag URLs instead of the own blog, I included a ready to use list of more or less popular external tag URLs including Technorati, Flickr, del.icio.us, de.lirio.us and Wikipedia.

from the slashdot dept.

Since I’ve always liked the often sarcastic or even evil comments inside Slashdot’s subtitle alike dept. lines and since I’m also used to use them at Symlink, I wanted them in my blog, too. Time for a new plugin.

The basic work of parsing out the data from the text files the posts reside in was already written for the tagging plugin. So I just had to use that code, simplify it and add some little more code to get the dept plugin whose results you can see in my blog directly beneath the title of a posting since a few days now.

Update 02:52h

Hey, see my Technorati profile: It worked! Technorati recognised the tags! Yeah!

Blosxom Plugin Tagging Version 0.03: Featuring related stories //at 00:30 //by abe

Wim de Jonge, an (as he writes) happy user of my blosxom plugin “tagging” asked, if the tags used in the plugin couldn’t be used to find related stories by looking for stories which share a number of tags with the current story.

Version 0.03 of tagging is the result of his suggestion. You can see in my blog how it looks like.

He also found a division by zero bug in the plugin which happend if there were only a few posts in a blog and therefore all tags only occurred once. This bug should be fixed now, too.

Now playing: Toto — Africa

Update 14:50h: Released version 0.03.1 as a bugfix releases since there was a slash missing in the related story links and some minor issues. Thanks again Wim for pointing out the error.

Blosxom like alternatives to Blosxom //at 12:57 //by abe

I really like the simplicity of Blosxom as blogging framework and I also like Perl very much. But somehow this Perl 4 alike global variables madness of Blosxom v2 sucks in several ways: It effectively prevents Blosxom from being used with mod_perl and it’s just not what I would call an API. I would like to have a more object-oriented plugin API and it should be save for use with FastCGI, mod_perl or similar possibilities to cache the parsed script code instead of reparsing with each request. Another thing should be a tagging facility. Had to write that by myself for Blosxom v2. (Wasn’t that hard though.) But since Blosxom v3 development seemed to have stopped in May 2004, I have been thinking about and looking for alternatives.

First thought was to write a Blosxom clone by myself using Embperl as framework (as I did with web galleries after not finding any web gallery software fitting all my needs).

But since I got infected with Ruby recently, I also thought about writting a Blosxom clone in Ruby, which would give me quite a lot of Ruby experience and would make a good fit since Ruby as well as Blosxom have some kind of Zen (or KISS) philosophy. The next thought was: I can’t be the first to come up with that idea and googled a little bit.

First thing I digged up was Rage, some kind of Blosxom on Rails. But I didn’t find any source code although the author seems to prefer open source software. Seems as if it is seems to be ready for production but not ready for public release.

The next thing I found was hint to some Blosxom clones in the Ruby Application Archive (RAA). Unfortunately two of them (sakura and lily) seem to have Japanese only web pages. :-(

But for luck the third Ruby based Blosxom clone found in the RAA, Blosxonomy, seems to be quite well featured, under actual development, has a english written web page and one of if its main concepts is taggability. And also the other core concepts sound fine: simplicity, extensibility and compatibility. Sounds really perfect and I’ll probably give it a try, but not on my current blog host: There is no Ruby installed and it’s not my own box.

Now playing: Rolling Stones — Ruby Tuesday

Blosxom Plugin Tagging Version 0.02: New Features //at 17:17 //by abe

Just hacked a few new features for my Blosxom plugin Tagging. It now shows you how many times you’ve used that tag. The number is always shown as title attribute to the link, but can optionally also be shown in parentheses behind the tag name or by the (CSS based) font size and/or color (start and end sizes/colors configurable). Also some default values changed (to my current configuration :-).

I saw that font size feature quite often during the last weeks and I liked it. I first tried to figure out, which system offers that feature and found that at least Serendipity’s freetag plugin offers it, but didn’t want to download Serendipity just for the plugin. So I decided, the algorithm for calculating the font sizes shouldn’t be that hard to find and coded it from scratch by my own. :-)

And while coding it I noticed that changing the color instead of the font size could be done the same way and that this feature isn’t much more difficult. So I implemented it, too.

Another new feature is that you now can configure the minimum number of postings a tag should have to show up in the list of tags.

The result can be seen in my blog on the right side under “Tag cloud”.

Now playing: Falco — Der Kommissar

Blosxom plugin tagging released //at 20:57 //by abe

I like the idea of categorising blog posts and I like blosxom, but even with multcat adding a post to multiple categories is somehow limited. In other blogs I often saw the technic of tagging articles with a keyword. I wanted that feature, too, but there weren’t any appropriate plugin for blosxom. Until now, because again, I just wrote it by my own…

So here is the blosxom plugin tagging, version 0.01. License is GPL v2 or higher.

tagging expects one or more “header” lines starting with “Tags: ” and being located directly under the first line, which always is the title. Those lines you can fill with comma seperated keywords (seperation by blanks possible via config) and shows them with appropriate links in $tagging::tag_list for the story template and $tagging::global_tag_list with all used keywords for the head or foot template.

Filtering is done using the -tags parameter in the query string. It uses the same delimiter as configured for the Tag header lines inside the posts.