Tagamac

Apologies to folks for the dead RSS feed that’s been hanging around for the past month; I switched hosts at the beginning of January, and the transition has been more rocky than I expected (thanks to the host not doing some standard things like providing easy emailing via PHP or standard server variables, but not notifying customers adequately). I’ve fixed the problems that were interfering with the Tagamac feed, though, and since things have been slow recently you haven’t missed much.

While I’m on the topic of the site itself, I’d like to let folks know that I’m aware Tagamac is languishing a bit. I’ve got a reimplementation and redesign of the site in the works, but it’s taking a while to get it up and running thanks to external distractions. In the meantime, things are likely to continue to be slow here for a while; I’ll still publish notable software updates and any articles that I’m inspired to write, but I’ll be letting some of the minor updates slip by unmentioned.

I’ve been a fan of MarsEdit since the second version was released recently, but I was never able to use it for Tagamac for two reasons: 1) terrible tagging support, and 2) no access to the shareware icon images that I use so often in news updates. The first issue was addressed by version 2.1, which implemented a standard tagging interface. The second was a bit more difficult. Daniel Jalkut, the developer, has said that he’s planning on providing some migration mechanism to get images from a weblog into MarsEdit’s media manager, but currently if you need this you’re out of luck.

I don’t give up easily, though, and ever since I relaunched Beckism.com (which as of the relaunch is completely authored in MarsEdit) I’ve been noticing that I’m updating Beckism.com more often than Tagamac because it’s easier. It was time to do something about this, particularly because Tagamac is far more popular, so I hacked away at MarsEdit’s plist and will from here on will be authoring Tagamac using MarsEdit instead of WordPress’s web interface. For those in a similar predicament, I’ve written up a guide on migrating images into MarsEdit, published over at Beckism.com.

Merlin Mann over at 43 Folders asked me to share some of my tagging feng shui with him and his readers. The result is a little how-to article on building a consistent tagging system called Becoming a tagging kung-fu master. It’s a rather good read, if I do say so myself, with similar ideas to The what and a couple other articles in the “Tagging guidelines” series.

For visitors from 43 Folders exploring Tagamac for the first time, welcome! you might want to check out Tagging best practices (the site’s most popular article to date), Easy choices (a short counterpoint to some of the thoughts from the 43 Folders article and my previous “The what” article), or the software reviews. There is also a list of the most popular articles in the archives.

Tagamac has been upgraded to WordPress 2.3, a release of the venerable open source blogging platform mostly notable for its inclusion of tagging. No longer shall bloggers be forced to suffer through Ultimate Tag Warrior’s bizarre installation and mountains of options. Tagging your blog posts is now officially supported.

Well, sort of. Unfortunately, WordPress 2.3 is very bare bones when it comes to tags. No auto-completion. No cloud underneath your editing window. You have to either remember all of your tags, or just go for broke with the random method. [read more...]

I just wanted to apologize to everyone who reads Tagamac for not having gotten a real article out the door in a while (software updates are alright, but they can’t substitute for an actual article). I very recently switched from freelance web design to a salaried web design, so my time has become marginally less my own, and I’m also working on a software review.

I’ve got a number of articles in various stages of draft, though, so once the review is out the door you can look forward to more interesting reading than a stream of version numbers and summarized release notes.

Although Tagamac is focused pretty closely on Mac OS X tagging software at the moment, my interest in tagging is a bit broader. To feed this obsession of mine, I wandered over to Ma.gnolia and set up a new group called Tag Your Life. Currently I’m the only (lonely) member, but if you like tags, occasionally stumble across articles about tagging outside of Tagamac, and are a member of Ma.gnolia (or willing to give it a try), you should check it out. I promise not to post links to Tagamac unless I write something really, really good.

Why Ma.gnolia? Because visiting del.icio.us is like getting slapped in the face by the color blue. This is my first venture into the world of social bookmarking, and I’d rather see pretty flowers than try the site that started it all.

Like tagging, but uninterested in Mac software updates? Like software updates, but hate my opinions/advice on tagging? Only interested in software reviews? We’ve got you covered!

Tagamac offers custom feeds for every section of the site, allowing you to subscribe only to what you want to read. You can choose your preferred subscription from our RSS info page, or use the following links to subscribe to the main sections that were available at the time of this writing. [read more...]

Unfortunately, I’m going to be somewhere without internet access, likely for the rest of this week. Youch! God/fate/whatever willing, I shall survive such deprivation.

However, that also means that I won’t be able to update Tagamac for the next week, and will be horribly remiss if you contact me. I’ve scheduled a couple articles to auto-post, though, so hopefully you won’t be too bereft. I’ll be back actively posting and writing in a few days!

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...]