Tagamac

How long has it been since I first launched the site? A week? Two? And it took me this long to notice that my articles weren’t being delivered to RSS readers in full text. Tell me these things, people!

Tagamac now features full text RSS articles. Of course, RSS articles will have ugly formatted images (until/unless I can create a WordPress plugin that inserts inline styles) and if the article falls in a series it won’t include the table of contents, but those hard-core types who never want to leave their RSS reader should now be a bit happier (okay, admittedly I’m one of them). Apologies to all subscribers for taking this long to notice the problem.

I’ve tried to make Tagamac as simple as possible to navigate, but given that it is a blog content tends to get recycled into the dreaded archives fairly quickly. Hopefully with the following tips and tricks, you’ll find it easy to locate that article that was so helpful in the past that you want to reread.

Although I love lists of three, there’s actually four different features of Tagamac that will hopefully make your life easier when it comes to finding content: the searchbar, sections, tags, and series. [read more...]

PackRat, a desktop client for 37signals’ Backpack, is on sale for 40% off today August 7th, 2007 only, available through the MacUpdate promo.

I have never used PackRat or Backpack, and thus can’t recommend either one. However, 37signals has an excellent reputation when it comes to web apps and I’ve heard good things about Backpack, which is essentially an online area for you to store notes, links, to-do lists, and more. Both Backpack and PackRat support tags for your notes, although the tags are basically just glorified categories. May be worthwhile, may be not. I leave it to your discretion.

My vision for Tagamac involves turning it into a resource that helps people with all aspects of tagging: understanding the concepts, finding software, creating a workflow, tagging consistently, etc. However, that’s a lot to cover, and it’s going to take me time to get to everything. While I’m plugging away at it, though, there are people out there who want to know how to tag right now. Quite frankly, in its current inception, Tagamac is not particularly helpful when it comes to jumping straight into tags. I don’t have any software recommendations or workflow advice; so far I’ve mainly been defining and offering basic guidelines.

I will try to get some software recommendations and reviews written in the near future, but it may be some time before I’m able to jump headfirst into real workflows. In the meantime, I’d like to offer some good resources elsewhere on the web that you can use to get your tagging system off the ground. Sadly, I haven’t been able to locate many good resources (which is a big reason I started Tagamac, actually), but at least there’s a few. [read more...]

Although this isn’t really a piece of software, per se, Circle Six Design updated their UTW-RPC WordPress plugin to work with WordPress 2.2.1+. The plugin allows remote editing using tools such as ecto or MarsEdit to assign tags using the popular Ultimate Tag Warrior or Simple Tagging plugins. The WordPress admin area is alright, but I’ve long been a fan of ecto, and this plugin is the magic that allows me to use it.

To download the plugin and for more info, visit the UTW-RPC and AutoTag download page.

Since I published my advice on tagging best practices, the most common question I’ve received has been something along the lines of “why the heck would you use singular tags?” Everyone agrees that consistency is the name of the game, and it’s hard to argue with succinctness. Some people disagree with using lowercase tags, but quite honestly it’s mainly personal preference (unless the program uses case-sensitive searching).

Whether or not to use singular tags, though, is a much more open question, and I’d like to lay out the reasons that I included a recommendation to stick to singular. [read more...]

iGTD, free Getting Things Done app, was updated today to version 1.4.5.4. This minor update includes a number of GUI improvements and bug fixes. Most notably, you can now configure the font size for tasks, and a task’s tags can optionally be shown at the end of the name field.

For the full details about the update, please see the release notes. If you prefer to have screenshots with your release notes, see the 1.4.5.4 blog entry.

I’ve added a glossary of the tagging terms I use on Tagamac. I’ll add terms to it as I use them in articles; currently it features the terms that I defined in Parts of Tagging, Tag Browsers, and Tagging Best Practices. Currently it’s a pretty short list.

My goal is to keep all the terms I use either immediately obvious or simple enough that someone who has no experience with tagging can pick them up easily. Regardless of whether I achieve that goal, I figure a glossary for reference can never hurt. Plus it makes me feel so important (“I have my own glossary! Whoopee! Who needs grad school, anyway?”).

One of the reasons that tagging can be difficult to get into is because few tagging systems are alike. Although there are similarities, tagging is not only still evolving as a way of organizing but there are also several different ways to think about tags.

The most striking difference between different tagging programs is generally the tag browser. The act of tagging is fairly standardized (auto-complete, drag and drop, etc.), but browsing is much more heterogeneous. Most browsers fall into one of three types: tag clouds, tag trees, or tag recipes. [read more...]

EagleFiler, Tagamac’s choice for tag-based file library software, was updated today to 1.2.4. This minor update mainly contains improvements to the way EagleFiler deals with PDFs, although some minor graphical changes and bug fixes were included as well.

For the full list of improvements, please see C-Command’s 1.2.4 update post.