A while back, I installed Bunny’s Technorati Tags plugin for adding tags to my posts that would be scanned by Technorati. There were some little things about it that bothered me, so I made a couple of small changes.
First, I made the post input box narrower so it would fit inside its frame. Second, I added the ability to enter phrases as tags if you surrounded them in double-quotes.
Like I said, it’s been a while, and now my needs have changed slightly.
I’m still interested in publishing those tags to Technorati, but I’m not relaly keen on dumping the linked tags into my feeds at the end of each post. So I fixed that, too. Now, the tags are added to the categories that go out with the feeds, instead of appearing as links. Technorati is supposed to pick these up, in addition to the specially marked anchor tags. I like this implementation because it makes the feeds a little cleaner.
While looking for updates to Bunny’s plugin in the repository, I noticed that Felix Wong has a great tagging plugin. It’s neat because it uses the fancy WordPress rewrite rules class to enable pretty URIs for tag searches. My issue with his plugin is that it creates a whole new table for the tag storage and it requires that you modify (hack) the admin UI to add/edit tags on posts. Not nice.
So… I never was one to leave “pretty good” alone…
I mashed all of that functionality together. The new tag-remix plugin is not much more than an amalgamation of the two plugins with the addition of the nice RSS category output for Technorati.
The plugin uses post meta info for tag storage, just like Bunny’s plugin, but it has the super-cool search engine friendly URLs from Felix’s plugin for returning posts that match queries tags.
You can see the tagging search engine in action on this site in the sidebar when you’re reading a single post. I used one of the Remix functions to output the tags for the current (this) post, and link it to an on-site tag search for each tag. The little “(t)” next to each is a link to the same tag on Technorati.
It seems to be working, although I’m not sure how well it really does since I don’t have a whole lot of tags. Some things it doesn’t do (yet, if at all) are tag heatmaps or combined listings. That could be pretty useful to include on my Categories page. It also has lost Bunny’s support for the “keyword” meta field fallback, which accidentally got in the way of my Delete key.
I’m not “releasing” this plugin since I didn’t really write most of it, but I’ll make it available in the spirit of the GPL in which everything involved is licensed. There isn’t any installation instructions, nor is there a warrany of any kind, so caveat emptor. (One thing I should note is that to get the tag search to work, you’ve got to go to your Options | Permalink page and re-save your permalink settings, which will set up the special search URLs.) This thing really is a different animal from the two that spawned it, so I hope nobody considers this as treading on anyone’s toes.
I wonder if there are other tag plugins that need rolled into this Frankenstein’s monster.
I wonder if there are other plugins that need to mate to make new monsters of their own. Hmm…
