User Tagging: Some Results
It has been roughly one month since I started my little end user tagging experiment, so let’s take a look at the results.
Mostly Harmless
Surprisingly, to me anyway, I have much less ‘tag spam’ than expected. I think I have blown away maybe 40 tags that were spammy (profanity, single letters and gibberish mostly). On the upside every post I have written since quietly going live has been tagged by end users.
My next step is to look at augmenting the built-in WordPress search with the tags that I am gathering. I might just write a replacement search for the site that uses tags and content indexing… who knows.
In case you were wondering
Yes, I am planning on releasing my customized version of UTW as soon as I can. My apologies to Chris Pirillo, things have been crazy yo.
Right now I am using a 3 tier classification structure for my content: categories, author tags and user submitted tags. After a year of collecting this could be very interesting.
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Where am I exactly?
I am sure some of you are wondering where I am lately, and what I am up to. Quite a few irons are in the fire currently, let me show you a couple of them.
On the book front
Hot on the heels of my Blog Design Solutions experience I was offered a book deal of my own by Apress. I am 5 chapters in on a book that covers development with WordPress. Aren’t you all excited?
CJD Notepad: Version 1.5.5.2
Just a quick update for CJD Notepad. You can find full notes on Notepads official home, there is one big addition and two smaller ones.
Why I love Open Source Software
Everyone give a big round of applause to http://economysizegeek.com/ for contributing the code to get the bookmarklets going. Very much appreciated.
Go on and download it and be amazed!
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CJD Notepad: Released
CJD Notepad has moved out of beta testing and into a release phase.
I have squashed all the bugs that were identified in the beta, and Notepad is now feature complete, at least for this iteration.
CJD Notepad in Beta
So my buddy Kartooner tells me he had this great idea for a plugin. What if we had a place to store information gathered for a post that was outside of the post mechanism, a place to take “notes”? He had looked around (apparently not very hard), and couldn’t find one, so would I like to write if for him?
Oh and apparently our Binary Bonsai friend thought it sounded keen as well.
I am such a push over
So I of course said, “Sure that would be easy.. all it really does is throw data into the DB and then take it back out again.” What a maroon. I had forgotten how much I like to tinker, and how I like to add features out the whazihoogee to stuff I write. So a few hours turned into 3 days of an hour here, two or three there.
I have been asked to expound on why this is better than using a draft or private post. Well for post_id in my design. So if I am planning a longer article, say like my Secrets of WP Theming series, but want to shoot off a couple of smaller posts between, then I don’t have to worry about the numbers getting out of order.
For other people, I have no idea. Kartooner and Michael think it is a good idea, so I could really care less. 3 people wanting to use it is enough to convince me it needs to be written.
So if you would like to check out this plugin, and help beta test, then by all means go over to the announcement page and read through the notes and download it.
And oh yes, I know there is another plugin that does almost the same thing, I found out about it today… but I like mine better, so there.
Spam Nuker 1.5.1
There is now a Spanish Localization of Spam Nuker, you can find it here: soteke’s weblog: Spam Nuker. The download link is near the end of the article. Thanks soteke for the great work!
I have released a pretty massive update to Spam Nuker 1.5(formerly known as Mass Delete)… already. Sad I know, but some comments on the other announcement got me to thinking about an extra feature. What is that cool new feature you ask… you can now select comments to mark as… NOT SPAM! So if a comment has been mislabeled for some reason you can easily fix it.
So yeah you can grab 1.5.1 in the same exact place as 1.5, enjoy.
There is now a changelog included in the plugin itself, on the plugin manager screen you will see a changelog link in the plugins description. Click the link and be astounded.
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Mass Delete for 1.5
Back in September of 2004 I released a plugin that allowed you to delete large amounts of spam with one click.
Some backstory
Basically one afternoon I was hit with a wave of spam that resulted in 1500+ comments awaiting moderation that were all spam. That was not a fun prospect, deleting all of those comments via the admin UI. So I took a trip to the terminal and issued one command, which wiped them all out.
So taking that experience I created a plugin that allowed you to delete comments by author, IP, email or URI. Now fast forward to WordPress 1.5. 1.5 has some wonderful toosl to help you combat spam built in, a blacklist feature, moderation by keywords and so on. At first I was stoked at how well these tools were working, I didn’t see any real waves of spam hitting my site, I was assuming that 1.5 was sending all that evil to /dev/null/ like a good little monkey.
I however, was very wrong.
This ones for Morydd
Today on #wordpress my buddy Morydd (pronounced Mo - ry - th) was making some suggestions for novel uses of gravatars which sparked something in my mind.
I am a fan of heatmaps, but could never get excited about having one here. I don’t care how many posts I have in each of my categories or any of that jazz. Now what I am interested in is commenters and the amount of commenting that is going on here at Sillyness.
This lead me to create Commenter Heat Map. You can see it in action over at this page. Now as the page says this is a work in progress and not ready to be released into the wild, but I am hoping to have it ready for anyone who wants it by the end of the week, along with my commenter coloring plugin.
So you know the drill, check it out and leave me some feedback.
Features, features
I really should have provided a link to a post that had alot of the coloring going on so you could really see it in action, so here you go.
So I have a new plugin running on my site at the moment that I whipped up today.
I have been styling my comments differently that everyone elses for awhile, but I thought it would be nice to apply some formatting to other commenters, for instance those that comment quite frequently, or those that I am pretty well aquainted with.
So I am beta testing the new plugin here… it is pretty simple really. I set up “profiles” for each person that link to some CSS. Now some people in the IRC channel have mentioned that they would like to have a version of this plugin that styles commenters by total number of comments, so I will be writing one of those as well.
So long story short, leave me some feedback as to the merit of this latest hackery. Is it worth having, or is it too distracting?
I will await your thoughts.
The cat, she is out of the bag
Well I guess it is now okay to talk about this little endeavour since khaled has seen fit to announce it and all.
Wow, talk about a “dream team” Michael and khaled are both fine designers and I think between Joshua and I we can handle anything code-foo wise that should rear its ugly head.
Hmmmm… I think we should call ourselves the A Team… cause you know they had a smokin van.
So gentle readers, taking a cue from khaled, what are you looking for in a new, shiny improved backend for WordPress? What we will be creating is a top -to-bottom conversion of the admin area. New UI and layout as well as new functions I would imagine. I have some ideas for some productivity functions that I am going to be hacking on, and I know that Michael and khaled will have some technical hurdles for Joshua and I to jump through as well. Should be fun.
So leave your gripes/complaints/wishes for a new UI in the comments here so we can start to get a picture of what we are dealing with.
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WordPress Support for “nofollow”
Well I am sure you have heard about the “nofollow” initiative making its rounds, courtesy of google.