cheeaunblog

Automatic tagging system

A lot of sites have implemented tagging systems nowadays. We tag our bookmarks on various social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, de.lirio.us, Furl, BlogMarks, Simpy and Wists. We also tag our photos and images on Flickr. We even tag the things we do on 43 Things and places around the world on 43 Places. It's obvious that tagging is pure fun.

Okay now it's time for us to tag our weblog posts. But how?

For some sites powered by MovableType or Wordpress, there's the existing categorical archiving system which can be used for tagging. I'm not very sure about the difference between categories and tags but I do notice some sites implement this. If I'm not mistaken, categories are hierarchical but tags are flat, right? When you organise your posts into categories, you might have to think if your future posts will use the same categories again. For tags, you are virtually free to specify any keywords that could add visible data relevant to the post.

Currently, I'm using Blogger as my content publishing system. It's pitiful that there are no categories or tags to play with, yet. It seems that the only way for me to tag is to use a Greasemonkey script which provides easy tagging for Blogger's posting interface. I'll just have to edit my previous blog posts and tag all of them one by one, breaking my fingers while navigating the mouse. That would be quite tiring though. To be frank, I'm a lazy guy. So lazy that I don't even know how many blog entries I've posted since the day I started blogging.

Due to my laziness, I have accidentally came up with an idea. Manual tagging is not a solution for me. So here I introduce the automatic tagging system. Just observe around and notice that it's already implemented on my blog. Generally, the concept is almost like how Jonathon Snook adds tagging for FontSmack. He uses PHP and MySQL to do the job. While I use only PHP. No MySQL or any database at all.

The system is very simple. Let's say if an article contains the keyword 'PHP', then it will be tagged 'php'. The tagging works relatively based on the presented content. If the 'PHP' keyword is not found, then it will not be tagged as such. I don't have to tag all posts by myself because the script will run through all my blog entries and tag them automatically. What I only need to do is to maintain a tags list to be used for the tagging system. The tags point to Technorati Tags and are displayed almost like Tantek's site.

Being a PHP beginner, I am way too embarrassed to show off the tagging codes to the public. Yet, it's still in beta testing. I think I will only release them based on special requests. While you're here, feel free to browse around and evaluate the efficiency of this implementation.

Cheers.

Labels: weblog

Posted over 5 years ago, on Wednesday, 20 July 2005