I’ve just recently completed most of the CMS portion of the site, allowing me to publish a few of the posts I’ve been working on over the Winter-break. I made a few design decisions along the way I’d like to share, mostly related to tagging and organising content.
I currently have two main types of content. Posts and Notes*, I worked on my Notes first since it gave me a way to syndicate out to Twitter, play with the Twitter API, and not have to write any serious post content. I then moved onto (largely) finishing off Posts. The Tag entity has many-to-many relationships with each, allowing the two types of content to share tags.
* I actually think I broke some IndieWeb rules by calling my blog posts ‘Posts’ instead of ‘Articles’. I think ‘post’ is meant to denote any type of content!
Don’t be afraid of the #hashtag
Starting with Notes affected a lot of the design process. My Notes are totally and unashamedly supposed to emulate Tweets. This meant I was already producing Notes with inline hashtags as they were syndicated out to Twitter. It was easy enough to write a bit of code to parse a Note for hashtags and create Tags as a Note is uploaded. Each time a Note is written, it’s parsed for hashtags, which are extracted, checked against the database, and either updated or created accordingly. Easypeasy. This allows me to use tag inline in Notes.
I knew I wanted to be able to tag Posts so that they showed up next to Notes in tag searches, but it didn’t quite feel right hashtagging them. I was wrong. Hashtagging is absolutely fine for Posts. Although you can argue that a hashtag is geared towards microblogging since it can be discerned inline as opposed to added in a separate ‘Tags’ form, I honestly don’t see why this makes them entirely unsuitable for use. The hashtag now has a wonderful history of use-cases, being used for: social justice movements; events and community dialogue; and even organising protests. Tagging your posts with hashtags allows you to contribute to these global dialogues, or at the very least acknowledge them.
Let the Tag take charge
Two things became apparent in my code when I was building Tags. First – I’m at least initially going to forget to put the hash on my Post tags. Second – Hashes are going to look horrible as url slugs.
My Tag model thus consists of two fields, the name (full hashtag) and the slug (hashtag minus the hash). I did this mainly because I thought it wasn’t particularly good practice to have to add (or remove) hashes when displaying or retrieving tags from the database. When tags are created, their name is set. Inside the setName() function, all tags are converted to hashtags if they’re not already. The slug is then updated automatically to the stripped version without developer input. This is to counteract my own stupidity. This mainly gets used in Posts, as tags from Notes are generally extracted if they’re a hashtag already.
Tags can be categories
Most of the arguments I read on this matter seemed to follow the line of “Categories are for broad, high-level descriptions of content; Tags are for low-level, post-specific descriptions”. I don’t buy that at all.
Tags are created dynamically, as and when they’re needed by the user tagging something. As you, or your user, writes content tags will inevitably recur. Why can’t you just tag some content with a tag that happens to be a high-level description of a post? That way you’ve created a category organically through use of the system. I read an argument about a downside of tags (link below) being the browsing experience, and having to generate a tag cloud to filter out the most popular tags. Erm, couldn’t you just create a panel with a list of manually ‘pinned’ tags that act as category filters? If you or a user notice a tag recurring quite a bit in content, and it’s a broad description – just slam a link to it on your Blog’s index page. You need to do this anyway with Categories, why not just save the hassle of manually assigning them?
In conclusion, tags are generally a good way to go. They can describe and categorise content at low and high levels, they’re generated organically on the fly, and if you go with the hashtag then you’ve got the opportunity to participate in community (or global) dialogues.
Long live the tag.