Whedonesque : Comments on 7144 : Look what Whedonesque got for its birthday: tags!

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July 07 2005

Look what Whedonesque got for its birthday: tags! It's the perfect gift for a three year old. Posts on Whedonesque can now be labelled with 'tags'. When you post a story to this site, please add some relevant keywords, using the new box in the posting form. Find out more about tags and their use in the link and if you have questions, please ask.

You'll also notice that instead of the old crufty URLs:

http://whedonesque.com/?comments=7020

posts can now be reached via the cleaner version:

http://whedonesque.com/comments/7020

And the same goes for other parts of the site, like our user pages:

http://whedonesque.com/?user=13

is the same as:

http://whedonesque.com/user/13

Big up to Milo for all this coding goodness.

Caroline | Site news | 01:27 CET | 36 comments total | tags: site news, development, tags

Nice, Milo. Can't wait to give it a whirl. Thanks to Whedonesque for all kinds of fun discussions and for allowing me to meet all kinds of cool folks. *ponders weekend travel plans*

zeitgeist | July 07, 02:02 CET

Special thanks specifically to our day to day moderators for keeping us on an even keel. Caroline, Simon, Herb, SoddingNancyTribe -- take a bow folks; well earned, that.

zeitgeist | July 07, 02:06 CET

Oooh... self indexing. I love metadata - but then I'm a librarian - it's our bread and butter.

Znachki | July 07, 02:34 CET

So how far and how comprehensively have you back-tagged?

chickenbird | July 07, 02:42 CET

So how far and how comprehensively have you back-tagged?

Well, we're proceeding by twist and turn. But it's fun.

[Edited for being absolutely non-helpful]

[ edited by SoddingNancyTribe on 2005-07-07 01:16 ]

SoddingNancyTribe | July 07, 03:00 CET

(Edited for making no sense since SNT edited his post)

Caroline | July 07, 03:05 CET

Ah. Thanks Caroline. That being the case, there's really no point in offering it to y'all, since the chance of randomly hitting upon the links that you've posted yourself is probably not so big.

I'd better get on with some more tagging then . . .

SoddingNancyTribe | July 07, 03:15 CET

Thanks, mods, this will likely help find particular posts. A question, though. If one does a search by tag, will the search locate the sequence of letters anywhere within a tag? For example, if someone were to use "smg+southland" as a tag, would a search for "smg" pull this up? Or southland? Or only those tags with exact matches? Since posters will be making up their own tags, there may be a great variety in words or combinations of words used in tags.

palehorse | July 07, 03:33 CET

Neat! My lovely iMac at the "doc" for six days (count 'em, SIX days... I sure did, huzzah for archival sweep&saves!), and I return to this new-y coolness.

Thanks, Milo! And of course kudos to all you blues and orangey-golds for implementing. New is good.

Willowy | July 07, 05:28 CET

Will there be a grand birthday shindig thread? How about a hootenanny? With yams? Seems the peeps might wish a forum to sing happy, happy, to Whedonesque, in unison, and woefully out of tune... Mods?

Well, if no, this seems as good a spot as any to offer my sincere thanks to Caroline, Simon, SoddingNancyTribe, Herb, Milo, et al for the gift of this forum. I don't understand me any 'tags' for coding yet, but I'm sure doing the dance of joy for the intelligent, provocative, and often times silly discourse found in this community of endlessly interesting, kind-hearted, like-minded souls. I'm fairly new to the fandom, and fairly new to the boards, but ever grateful for all I've learned and for the amazing people I've 'met.' Friends all. And perhaps... *ponders zeitgeist's weekend travel plans* ; )

Thanks guys. So very much.

barest_smidgen | July 07, 06:08 CET

And, of course, the Whedonesque member dating service is an exciting optional extra . . . ;)

Just watch out for online elderly Dutch women, that's all I have to say.

SoddingNancyTribe | July 07, 06:55 CET

What barest_smidgen said pretty well covers my feelings towards the extra special people at Whedonesque - those who moderate and those who are moderate in their comments and yet manage to be thought-provoking as well.

Congratulations, Whedonesque! and Caroline, Simon, SoddingNancyTribe and Herb for their continued efforts. May you live long and prosper - sorry, wrong forum:)

[ edited by samatwitch on 2005-07-07 05:15 ]

samatwitch | July 07, 07:14 CET

Awesome! I'm a big fan of organization, organization, and surprisingly, even more organization :D It's always nice to have extra options for sorting through and reading older topics. Not that I don't see each new topic as it pops up :) (Yay for rss and rss syndication to livejournal.)

abbylee | July 07, 08:06 CET

Well, we're proceeding by twist and turn. But it's fun.

I'm also a librarian, and am really impressed by this. This site has just become such a resource for me, like so many others, and all the mods and creators have my thanks.

If it stops being fun, and you want some help, I'm willing (I've done all-night indexing sessions before!), although I am new at posting here so not sure if its useful. But if you do, I'm sure there are others willing too.

sojourner | July 07, 09:17 CET

Thanks, Milo and all you other pretty-color-folks for yet another contribution to the site's usability. I generally find tags scratchy and annoying and I avoid them in clothing whenever possible, but these are going to be immensely helpful, I can tell already. Just another reason -- besides the excellent information, civil discourse and sparkling wit often found in abundance here -- that this place rules and schools the rest.

(Well, it does! :)

Wiseblood | July 07, 09:39 CET

A question, though. If one does a search by tag, will the search locate the sequence of letters anywhere within a tag? For example, if someone were to use "smg+southland" as a tag, would a search for "smg" pull this up? Or southland? Or only those tags with exact matches? Since posters will be making up their own tags, there may be a great variety in words or combinations of words used in tags.

Milo did mention this is a feature that could be added in the future, palehorse. As for the variety in words, I think some sort of tagging convention will evolve over time, and we could also eventually add some tricks to merge similar tags (comic, comics, etc)

Caroline | July 07, 09:48 CET

It's the perfect gift for a three year old.

Now I know what to get my nephew for his birthday! Thanks, Whedonesque!

*thumbs up pose*

kishi | July 07, 12:05 CET

First of all: Herzlichen Glückwunsch!

and no this isn’t a new Chinese swearword but rather Happy Birthday in German. Big thanks for this amazing site and to Milo for the extra feature.

Secondly, am I going completely mad (always possible), or is this site now automatically logging me in each time I go to look at a post and the relevant comments? Because that sure is what is happening on my computer.

miranda | July 07, 12:38 CET

Thanks, Milo! Excellent feature.

And no, miranda, your're not going mad. My computer is doing the same. Are we being 'tagged' as well?

Madhatter | July 07, 14:04 CET

Hmm. What have you two been up to? I'm not being logged on automatically.
Kudos to Milo for the new tags. Metadata is good.And Happy Birthday slightly belated to Whedonesque. Even if, it appears, there is no "esque" in JW's name.

Lioness | July 07, 14:59 CET

Nevermind, I had a page in the background. Anyway, I just wanted to thank our Whedonesque's creators. They are the best. I've been to many a sites and none will top this one. And a salute to my fellow members on this third year. I can't tell you the joy you brought to my heart. Bottom line, this site rocks with intelligence :)

Madhatter | July 07, 16:20 CET

And, of course, the Whedonesque member dating service is an exciting optional extra . . . ;)

Tries to think of a cheeky reply... fails. *smiles*

[ edited by zeitgeist on 2005-07-07 15:33 ]

zeitgeist | July 07, 17:32 CET

Hmm, I always get logged in automatically. In fact I can't remember the last time I actually logged in, it was months ago.

Must add my thanks to all the creators/mods - this is my most visited (probably anyway, hard to know exactly) and favourite site.

Paul_Rocks | July 07, 17:38 CET

Yay. Happy birthday Whedonesque. Enjoy the tags (They're all the rage, apparently). And especial thanks to the moderators who have perpetrated the inconceivable by keeping threads on topic (and agenda free) :-). You probably realise this, but it's that effort that makes the site a joy to return to again and again. Well, that and the juicy gossy bits, er, information.

Also. Yay!

giles (yes, it is my real name) | July 07, 17:45 CET

SNT...need your postal address in order to forward my retroactive WheDate membership dues. I feel sorta like I've been stealing cable, and wish to make it right. Please advise.

barest_smidgen | July 07, 17:50 CET

Glad you like the tags, guys. I for one am a proponent of 'the more tags the better', so don't hold back on adding even really obscure/specific tags, I say.

Re: the login weirdness:
Turns out there were some cookie problems because of the new fancy /comments/123 urls. It should be fixed now. If you really want to log out but find you can't, click here once to clear the bad cookies: Log out

milov | July 07, 17:57 CET

What's the cost on the membership dues and does membership give you discounts on travel/airfare? Would've been nice to know that one ahead of time... ;) It's regional, right? So we in the States send our fees to SNT?

[ edited by zeitgeist on 2005-07-07 17:32 ]

zeitgeist | July 07, 19:10 CET

Controlled vocabulary would be nice.

E.g. http://whedonesque.com/tag/interviews has seven entries, and http://whedonesque.com/tag/interview has fifteen entries. If we had a controlled vocabulary, they would be together under one tag (one or the other) with a total of 22 entries.

When I'm tagging my old entries, I try to guess what other people have used, and try that URL (e.g. when I tagged by old AtS wildfeed summary link, I tried http://whedonesque.com/tag/wildfeed, and then used the same three tags Caroline had used on two she had posted). However, this is very hit-and-miss.

Can the mods perhaps at least post a list of "tags used so far" under a "help" link next to the "Tags" input box? That way we can more easily browse for a vocabulary item (a tag) that has already been used.

I also assume the mods will go through the DB and do some nice global-ish UPDATE commands to fix problems in vocabulary similarities that have already been created.

One can easily see how much more useful tags are when people use a common vocabulary. Sorry, it's just that I do this sort of thing for a living, and it irks me when it isn't done as logically and consistently as it could be done.

[ edited by chickenbird on 2005-07-07 19:43 ]

chickenbird | July 07, 21:42 CET

Oh, also?

Should we reiterate macro categories like 'AtS', 'Cast&Crew', 'General', 'Site Discussion', etc, even though those are already accessible in a separate way (and represent a broader, older way of tagging posts)?

chickenbird | July 07, 21:46 CET

Also, why can't we do the equivalent of SELECT * FROM foo WHERE userid='chickenbird' to find all our old posts? For example, on our use profile pages, it says "[user] has posted [NN] links and [NNN] comments to WHEDONesque" and the '[NNN] comments' is a link that effectively executes this statement for comments, but the '[NN] links' one is not a live link.

chickenbird | July 07, 21:55 CET

OK, sorry to be an enormous geek, but the more I think about it, the more the reiteration of the macro "Categories" makes no sense. For one thing, it's already been done, and for another, there's the special character (URL encoding) problem of those damn ampersands. e.g., whether you type "http://whedonesque.com/tag/firefly&serenity" or http://whedonesque.com/tag/firefly&serenity", Apache still thinks 'serenity' is a URL parameter preceded by a parameter separator.

Anyway, in this example it seems more useful to use the two separate tags/keywords "firefly" and "serenity" since sometimes only one or the other applies, and both can be applied in the usual comma-separated manner when necessary. Same for "Cast&Crew", but "Fandom&Fun" seems much more difficult -- isn't all fandom fun, and vice versa? Heh.

chickenbird | July 07, 22:10 CET

chickenbird: you might want to roll all your technical suggestions into an e-mail and address it to either Caroline or Milo. Thanks.

SoddingNancyTribe | July 07, 22:19 CET

Chickenbird - seems to me the main issues with controlled vocabulary in a situation like this that it partially defeats the idea of the poster setting the tags on their post. Unless you are also advocating mapping the terms?

Of course controlled vocabulary is the way to get the best "stuff", but given the time and effort involved in setting up and maintaining it, not to mention the extra effort involved in learning to navigate the site, it's probably not the way to go. It's the old precision and recall proportions.

Most folks generally won't want to take the time.

BTW everyone - welcome to the ongoing dialog of catalogers and reference librarians!

[ edited by Znachki on 2005-07-07 20:37 ]

Znachki | July 07, 22:36 CET

I also assume the mods will go through the DB and do some nice global-ish UPDATE commands to fix problems in vocabulary similarities that have already been created.

That's also what I was thinking. But I want to wait quite a bit more and see how the tag list grows before even considering remapping existing tags. And a controlled vocabulary takes some of the fun out of tagging, imho, at least at this stage.

milov | July 07, 22:51 CET

Znachki, I'm not advocating for folks to take extra time, only that, given a blank slate in my mind of possible tags to use, I'd rather use something someone else already used ('interview') instead of something I make up myself ('interviews').

A controlled vocabulary also prevents spelling and typographical errors in tagging.

SNT, thank you for directing me to the correct people -- there are several moderators and I wasn't sure which one(s) would be best to address about this.

chickenbird | July 07, 22:52 CET

milov -- that's fine, we don't need to have a controlled vocabulary right now if you are planning on a clean-up later on. I just think it is ludicrous to have two really similar tags that only differ grammatically, for example. But since you plan to deal with it later anyway, my fears are laid to rest. Thanks.

chickenbird | July 07, 22:55 CET

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