John Wang on Technology tag:www.dev411.com,2005:Typo Typo 2007-06-16T12:30:24-05:00 John Wang urn:uuid:e11a20ac-c1e6-41c9-888e-6a339717488e 2006-08-16T01:18:00-05:00 2007-06-16T12:30:24-05:00

<p>Today, Google announced the next version of Blogger, <a href="http://buzz.blogger.com/2006/08/blogger-in-beta.html">Blogger Beta</a>. As part of this upgrade, Blogger will finally get categorization. Like Gmail, Blogger will only give you 'labels' which other blog engines such as Typo and MovableType give you both categories and tags. When both categories and tags are available, there's often a question as how to use them, either together or one or the other. This can be seen in some blogs where there doesn't seem to be rhyme or reason to what is a category and what is a tag. For Typo, this is somewhat complicated by that fact that tags came along after categories, so some blogs used them for the same thing but never got rid of the old categories after switching to tags so there appears to be some overlap.</p>

<p>Today, Google announced the next version of Blogger, <a href="http://buzz.blogger.com/2006/08/blogger-in-beta.html">Blogger Beta</a>. As part of this upgrade, Blogger will finally get categorization. Like Gmail, Blogger will only give you 'labels' which other blog engines such as Typo and MovableType give you both categories and tags. When both categories and tags are available, there's often a question as how to use them, either together or one or the other. This can be seen in some blogs where there doesn't seem to be rhyme or reason to what is a category and what is a tag. For Typo, this is somewhat complicated by that fact that tags came along after categories, so some blogs used them for the same thing but never got rid of the old categories after switching to tags so there appears to be some overlap.</p> <p>In my opinion, categories should be used for high level groupings. For example, <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/">The Register</a> uses: Enterprise, Software, Internet, Telecoms, Mobile, Security, Management, Science and Odds &amp; Sods. <a href="http://news.google.com/">Google News</a> uses : Top Stories, US, Business, Sci/Tech, Sports, Entertainment, Health and Most Popular. In the past, when people had different subjects they wished to talk about on Blogger, they often got different Blogger blogs to discuss each topic. When categories are available, they can e used to delineate such groupings. IMO, there should only be a limited number of categories and they should cover the general areas discussed by the blog. It would be nice if the categories appeard in a horizontal navbar under the header which will be a lot easer with the mulit-sidebar enhancement.</p> <p>I feel that tags, on the other hand, should be used liberally to cover just about any subject that one may wish to discuss on two or more articles, kind of like short cuts to a search. This follows the typical usage pattern for Delicious where one can end up with many tags.</p> <p>For this blog, I only have 'tags' (which are really renamed categories from when I was running 2.6.0) but I'm thinking about adding categories as well. Most of the articles now are related to software development so I don't think high level categories are needed. If I do add them however, they will be along the lines of: (a) Development (software programming), (b) Management (things like marketing, entrepreneurship, venturecapital) and (c) Legal (patents, contracts, etc.). That's just to give an idea of how I would use categories and tags together.</p> John Wang urn:uuid:f8eb6729387946291159948cb9e9cc7b 2006-07-02T21:37:00-05:00 2007-06-16T12:30:22-05:00

<p>I've been experimenting with Typo at <a href="http://www.dev411.com/blog/">the new Dev411 blog</a> primarily to get around the serious performance problems I (and many others) have experienced on Blogger. I know they are working on this and I hope they get it under control soon, however I didn't want to wait for something that may or may not happen so I've moved everything over to <a href="http://www.dev411.com/blog/">http://www.dev411.com/blog/</a>. Typo has some nice features include categories/tags and Live Search which shows you search results as you type. Of course, I may switch back to Blogger (or to another engine) at some point but I'm hoping I won't have to change again.</p> <p>I'm running 2.6.0 which is the current stable version according to the website though many people are running code directly from the SVN trunk. I'll probably wait for 4.0 before upgrading which I've heard should be coming out soon. In the mean time I've made some changes from the default configuration:</p> <ul> <li>added table of contents to pages with multiple articles (index, category/tag, archives and search) <a href="/blog/2006/06/26/adding-a-toc-to-typo">described previously</a>.</li> <li>renamed categories to tags. The trunk supports both categories and tags but 2.6.0 only has categories. I simply renamed categories to tags by editing <span class="fix">routes.rb</span> and <span class="fix">content.rhtml</span> for the category plugin. When 4.0 comes out, I'll use the separate categories and tags and the tag uris will stay the same.</li> <li>moved categories/tags from bottom of each post to top by editing <span class="fix">articles_helper.rb</span> and templates.</li> <li>removed <span class="fix">articles</span> from uri by editing <span class="fix">routes.rb</span>.</li> <li>added number of comments to Live Search AJAX results by editing <span class="fix">views/live/search.rhtml.</span></li> <li>added blog name to HTML title for individual article pages by editing <span class="fix">articles_controller.rb</span>.</li> <li>added Blog Roll sidebar which is just a copy of the static sidebar plugin. It would be nice if you could use the same static plugin multiple times but copy/rename is easy enough.</li> </ul> <p>Features I'd like to add:</p> <ul> <li>Navigation breadcrumbs</li> <li>More specific HTML page titles</li> <li>The anchor slider from the Modernist theme</li> <li>A logarithmic tag cloud; the trunk version is linear</li> <li>Ability to categorize tags similar to del.icio.us tag bundles; this is supposed to be doable now with <span class="fix">acts_as_taggable</span></li> <li>A tag list that also has links to tags you use at del.icio.us and possibly other places</li> </ul>

<p>I've been experimenting with Typo at <a href="http://www.dev411.com/blog/">the new Dev411 blog</a> primarily to get around the serious performance problems I (and many others) have experienced on Blogger. I know they are working on this and I hope they get it under control soon, however I didn't want to wait for something that may or may not happen so I've moved everything over to <a href="http://www.dev411.com/blog/">http://www.dev411.com/blog/</a>. Typo has some nice features include categories/tags and Live Search which shows you search results as you type. Of course, I may switch back to Blogger (or to another engine) at some point but I'm hoping I won't have to change again.</p> <p>I'm running 2.6.0 which is the current stable version according to the website though many people are running code directly from the SVN trunk. I'll probably wait for 4.0 before upgrading which I've heard should be coming out soon. In the mean time I've made some changes from the default configuration:</p> <ul> <li>added table of contents to pages with multiple articles (index, category/tag, archives and search) <a href="/blog/2006/06/26/adding-a-toc-to-typo">described previously</a>.</li> <li>renamed categories to tags. The trunk supports both categories and tags but 2.6.0 only has categories. I simply renamed categories to tags by editing <span class="fix">routes.rb</span> and <span class="fix">content.rhtml</span> for the category plugin. When 4.0 comes out, I'll use the separate categories and tags and the tag uris will stay the same.</li> <li>moved categories/tags from bottom of each post to top by editing <span class="fix">articles_helper.rb</span> and templates.</li> <li>removed <span class="fix">articles</span> from uri by editing <span class="fix">routes.rb</span>.</li> <li>added number of comments to Live Search AJAX results by editing <span class="fix">views/live/search.rhtml.</span></li> <li>added blog name to HTML title for individual article pages by editing <span class="fix">articles_controller.rb</span>.</li> <li>added Blog Roll sidebar which is just a copy of the static sidebar plugin. It would be nice if you could use the same static plugin multiple times but copy/rename is easy enough.</li> </ul> <p>Features I'd like to add:</p> <ul> <li>Navigation breadcrumbs</li> <li>More specific HTML page titles</li> <li>The anchor slider from the Modernist theme</li> <li>A logarithmic tag cloud; the trunk version is linear</li> <li>Ability to categorize tags similar to del.icio.us tag bundles; this is supposed to be doable now with <span class="fix">acts_as_taggable</span></li> <li>A tag list that also has links to tags you use at del.icio.us and possibly other places</li> </ul>