Want to add a tag cloud to your own site? The easiest way to do this is to run your site on Blosxonomy. Blosxonomy is inspired by Blosxom, but at its core is driven by the principles of folksonomy. Tag clouds are just one of many standard features that Blosxonomy gives you for navigating your site - it also infers relationships between your posts based on how they're tagged, allowing a unique experience in navigating your site!

Alternatively, if you don't want to jump full on into Tags, and are currently a pyBlosxom user, you can download my Folksonomy Plugin for pyBlosxom, which will help get you started quickly with tagging and tag clouds. Once you've gone that far, migrating to Blosxonomy is easy!

I revisted my tagsearch implementation this evening and realized I could make it both much simpler and much more powerful. I now support queries with mixed and/or syntax. "and" has higher precedence - so:

http://www.timfanelli.com/tags/python/folksonomy+ruby/blosxonomy

Will return all posts the are tagged ( "python" and "folksonomy" ) or ( "ruby" and "blosxonomy" )

This is accomplished by taking the request string that matches /^\/tags/(.*)/ and splitting it first on +. I then take each element in the resulting array, split on / and find entries that match all the tags. The results are appended together to build the final response.

This is all accomplished in a few simple lines:

m = Regexp::compile( config['tags_path'] + "/(.*)", Regexp::IGNORECASE ).match( pathinfo )
if m
	ortags = m[1].split('+')		
	ortags.each { |andtags| app['entries'] |= fel.getEntriesWithAllTags( andtags.split('/') ) }
end

Where fel is my File Entry Locator. I envision this changing a little bit when I design the SQL Entry Locator, and supporting queries directly in the locator API.

Again, this feature will be released with Blosxonomy 0.6.

I enabled multi tag searching today in Blosxonomy. This is a feature that was already in place, but my URL processing didn't account for. Multi tag searching allows you to lookup entries that match any or all tags specified in the query string - for instance:

http://www.timfanelli.com/tags/svn/apple

Will lookup all entries that are tagged "svn" and "apple".

http://www.timfanelli.com/tags/svn+apple

Will lookup all entries that are tagged "svn" or "apple".

This opens up the possibility to do some cool things, such as showing a "related tag cloud" instead of the full tagcloud when you're searching on a tag. Clicking on a tag in the related tag cloud could append the new tag as an and or an or, allowing to your refine your results with a dynamic view of available relationships.

This feature will be relesed with blosxonomy 0.6.

I wrote a quick plugin this morning to generate links to related books (or other items) at Amazon.com using Amazon's Web Services (AWS), based on your entry's tags.

The plugin queries AWS's ItemSearch for each tag in an entry, and then sorts out the results in decreasing order of how many tags a product was returned in. Links are then generated using Amazon's product images for the top N results, where N is some configurable number of products. All the links are generated using your own Amazon Associates ID as well.

You can download it here

From the plugin documentation:

Uses your Amazon Web Services account to query products related to 
your Folksonomy Tags. This plugin does not require Folksonomy, 
however if you are using Folksonomy, please get the latest version 
of it, as there were some potential conlicts over the 'tags' 
metadata entry.

Obtains a REST response from the following URL:

http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService
	&AWSAccessKeyId=config['aws_access_key']
	&AssociateTag=config['aws_associates_id']
	&SearchIndex=config['aws_product_type']
	&Operation=ItemSearch
	&Keywords=
	&Availability=Available
	&Merchant=Amazon
	[&Publisher=config['aws_favorite_pub']]

Specify your AWS Access Key and the type of product to 
search for in your config.py, like so (defaults are as 
shown here):

	# Your AWS Access key
	py['aws_access_key']=		

	# Your Amazon Associates ID
	py['aws_associates_id']=		

	# The type of product to search on.
	py['aws_product_type']=Books			
	
	# Restricts selections to a particular publisher
	py['aws_favorite_pub']=  

	# The number of books to show on a page.
	py['story_product_count']=4			

	# The size of the amazon img to retrieve
	py['aws_image_size']="MediumImage""		

aws_image_size can be one of:
	SmallImage
	MediumImage
	LargeImage

I like to use MediumImage and then scale it down using CSS. The 
SmallImage returns a very low-res picture from Amazon, and is 
useful if you don't have a lot of bandwidth.

aws_product_type and aws_favorite_pub can be overridden on a 
per-story basis by defining metadata with the same key name in 
your story. So for instance, if your config.py specifies an 
aws_product_type of "Books", but you just posted about DVDs, 
you could override this setting for your story by doing:

	My Post on DVDs
	#tags batman,superman,mighty mouse
	#aws_product_type DVD
	<p>DVDs are awesome.</p>

Valid aws_product_type values are 
	[ "Books","Music","DVD","Toys","Video Games","Software",
	  "Software Video Games","Electronics","Tools",
	  "Sporting Goods","Art Supplies","Kitchen","Gourmet Food",
	  "Apparel","PC Hardware","VHS" ]

aws_product_type defautls to "Books"

Populates a varaible $relatedproducts for use in your story 
template, that will contain HTML like:

	<div id="relatedproducts">
		<a class="productlink" href="product url">
			<img class="productimg" src="product img"/>
		</a>
		<a class="productlink" href="product url">
			<img class="productimg" src="product img"/>
		</a>
	</div>

If you do not want to generate related products for a particular 
entry, add a "noproducts" metadata entry:

	My Entry with No Products
	#noproducts

Folksonomy 1.2 is avaialble for download

Folksonomy is a pyBlosxom plugin that infers relationships between your blog entries based on tags; providing links to related stories, links to related tags, a tag cloud, and the ability to search for entries by tag.

What's New: As of Folksonomy 1.2, there are no longer any dependencies on other plugins. Folksonomy is now a complete tagging solution for pyBlosxom. If you're already using Tags or Tag Cloud, simple replace those plugins with Folksonomy, and you'll still have all the same functionality you had before!

Folksonomy Quick Guide:

Configuration

Add the following entries to your config.py:

py['pretext'] = "<div class="tags">Tags:""
py['posttext'] = "</div>"
py['tagsep'] = ", "
#py['tag_url'] = "http://mysite/tags"  # defaults to $base_url/tags
#py['tag_url_display'] = "http://mysite/tags" # defaults to tag_url
#py['ignore_tags'] = []

pretext, posttext and tagsep will be used to render the $tags variable for your story template. tag_url is the base url to search for tagged entries. Links to tags will be to the url: $tag_url/. tag_url_display is useful if you use mod_rewrite (or an equivellant) to hide the actual URL of your tag_url. For instance, my tag_url is http://www.timfanelli.com/blog/tags/, but I use mod_rewrite to make it http://www.timfanelli.com/tags/ instead. tag_url_display effectively overrides my tag_url when generating links (tag_url is still needed for searching though, so don't change it!). Finally, ignore_tags will cause Folksonomy to ignore those specified tags when infering relationships and creating the tag cloud, but you'll still be able to search for entries with those tags.

Install Folksonomy

This parts easy, just copy folksonomy.py to your plugins directory, and enable it in your py['load_plugins'] if necessary. If you already have Tags or Tag Cloud installed, you may uninstall those plugins now.

Tag Your Entries

This part could be, as they say in French, the suck. Especially if you have a lot of entries. Tagging a single entry is very easy, just add a line like the following:

#tags tag1,tag2,tag3

Below your entry title. I've created a little helper script that will tag all your entries based on their category just to get you started (BACK UP FIRST, I TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR LOST OR DAMAGED CONTENTS). My friend Matt used it successfully though.

Set Up Your Templates

Now that everything's tagged, we need to set up your templates to show all the cool stuff. Starting with your story template:

• Add $tags to your story, mine is located just underneath the body. This will show the tags for your entry.
• Add $relatedstories, mine is located at the very bottom of my story template, and I use CSS to make it look nice.
• Add $relatedtags, I don't show this on my blog because I don't think it adds much value, but it's there if you want to use it.

Then your header or footer template for the tagcloud:

• Add $tagcloud or $populartagcloud wherever you like, mine is in my side bar defined in my footer template.

$popular tag cloud is a rebalanced subset of your full $tagcloud -- use this if you have a lot of tags with very few entries. It'll help reduce clutter on your page. I'm currently working to enable a URL that will show the full tag cloud for use with this feature.

Voila!

Your blog should now be folksonomy enabled. Easy, right?

Leave Feedback

I'm very excited about how well Folksonomy has been received so far in the pyBlosxom community, and I fully intend to keep it under active development. Please leave your feedback as comments here, or feel free to email me.

I published the first release of my Folksonomy plugin tonight. Folksonomy infers relationships between your pyBlosxom entries based on their tags, allowing you to generate lists of related stories for each entry.

I still have a couple items to polish up, and I want to merge my tag_cloud plugin into Folksonomy before I submit it to the pyBlosxom registy, but you can get this first pass here.

Inspired by Pete, and intrigued by the word Folksonomy, I decided to switch my blog to use tags for organization rather than categories.

The birds-eye difference is minimal, I can have multiple tags per entry, whereas each entry belongs to only a single category. While that doesn't sound very powerful in and of itself, using tags extends your ability to relate posts to each other, creating a more meaningful reading experience for your blog.

Getting started with Tags in pyBlosxom is a two step process:

1. Install Joe Topjian's Tags plugin. I've done some work on it lately and submitted my changes to Joe - meanwhile you can find my version of it here.
2. Install my Tag Cloud plugin.

Installation of both plugins is very simple, just copy them to your pyblosxom plugins directory (rename the plugins to have a .py extension; the .txt extensions are for web browser convenience).

Once those are in place, we're ready to start tagging our entries. This can be a pain, because pyBlosxom uses the entry file's last modified date as it's post date. I edited each file by hand on Mac OS X (this will also work on any Unix), using a text editor and the touch command, like so:

Oct 23 17:17:05 2005 about.txt
> nano -w about.txt && touch -t 0510231717.05 about.txt

This will retouch the file to its original date immediately after my text editor returns.

To add a tag, simply add a #tags section to your entries metadata, like so:

About Timothy Fanelli
#tags about
<p>My entry goes here.</p>

Alternatively, you could use the one of the various plugins available for editing pyBlosxom entries, or a plugin that caches files post times instead of using the mtime.

Once you have your entries tagged, you should add the $tags variable to your story template, and add the $tagcloud or $populartagcloud to your flavour template. Mine is in my foot template where I define my sidebar. Simply add one of the two tag cloud variables where you want your tagcloud to appear:

The popular tag is generated by taking tags from the full cloud that would be at least a "medium" weight, recalculates the distribution, and applies new weights to the abbreviated cloud. This is useful if you have a lot of tags with few entries that don't really apply to your blog's main topic. I'm working on an extension to the plugin that will allow you to show the full cloud as an entry, check back for updates soon!

Once you have this in place, you're all but done! Your blog now has full tag support, in addition to your regular category structure.

I've gone one step further on my blog and eliminated my category structure all together. I did t his by moving all my entries into a single category called "item". I then used apache's mod_rewrite to redirect requests for categories to the closest appropriate tags, and to redirect my old permalinks to the entry's new home in the item category - here's a sample of my rewrite rule section of my httpd.conf:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/blog/linux/?$ /tags/linux [R=301]
RewriteRule ^/blog/windows/?$ /tags/windows [R=301]
RewriteRule ^/blog/xml/?$ /tags/xml [R=301]

RewriteRule ^/blog/linux/(.+$ /blog/item/$1 [R=301]
RewriteRule ^/blog/windows/(.+)$ /blog/item/$1 [R=301]
RewriteRule ^/blog/xml/(.+)$ /blog/item/$1 [R=301]

So any request to http://www.timfanelli.com/blog/linux (my old linux category), will redirect to http://www.timfanelli.com/tags/linux (my new linux tag). If I had an entry under linux named "my_entry", then the old permalink of http://www.timfanelli.com/blog/linux/my_entry.html now redirects to http://www.timfanelli.com/blog/item/my_entry.html.

Last night my Tag Cloud Plugin was posted in the pyBlosxom plugin registry!

I installed the tags plugin tonight, and tagged most of the entries on my site. I decided to replace categories all together, and as such, you'll notice a tag cloud on the left side of my site.

I wrote a simple pyBlosxom plugin to generate the tag cloud, to be used in conjunction with the tags plugin. You can download it here: tag cloud plugin.

From the plugin documentation:

tag_cloud.py

Creates a tagcloud to compliment the tags plugin. Simply copy to 
your plugins directory and enable in py['load_plugins'] if 
necessary. The tags plugin must be installed and properly 
configured.

Simply add a #tags tag1[,tag2[...]] to your entry metadata section.

You should then define the following classes:
	.smallestTag
	.smallTag
	.mediumTag
	.bigTag
	.biggestTag

as well as

	#tagcloud

in your CSS to fit your needs.

As of 1.0.1, tag_cloud supports the following config property:
	py[ 'ignore_tags' ] = [ ]

where 'ignore_tags' is a list of tags to ignore while generating 
the tag cloud. This way, if you have a very widely used tag, such 
as "general", which is overwhelming your tag and isn't necessary, 
you can choose to omit it. 

As of 1.0.2, tag_cloud obeys the ignore_directories propery in 
pyblosxom.

To use the cloud, simply add $tagcloud somewhere to your head or foot templates. Mine happens to be in the foot template, because that's where I keep my sidebar code.

Comments, bug reports, and fixes are welcome!