Tag Central

One of the neatest things I’ve found lately is the proliferation of websites to manage aspects of your life publicly. Seeing as I’m not totally privacy paranoid, it’s a fun hobby. I recently discovered All Consuming which was created by Erik Benson. It’s a neat way to track books, music, and movies that you’re reading, listening to, and watching respectively. Robot Co-op, the company that runs 43 Things, bought it up. This means that the two services will soon be intertwined. 43 Things is one of the sources on Tag Central but unfortunately All Consuming is not because they don’t supply RSS feed for their tags. Hopefully that will change. ...

During a round of service adding last night, I figured out a way to differentiate between no results and an error. That’s good because now users will know when they’ll have to visit the source itself to see the results. The worst error offender by far is Technorati. Probably the majority of the tags will come up with an error message. You can then run their feed through the feed validator and witness for yourself the problem. ...

I took a couple hours, learned PHP’s objects and redesigned Tag Central so that all the information for the sources could be stored in a big array object. Now it’s trivial for me to add a new source, so I can start adding all those sources that everyone submitted. I may started restricting the number of results per source to a smaller number (such as I have done with BlogMarks) to avoid unsightly white space and making the page utterly huge. ...

Peter Parkes reskinned Tag Central using PithHelmet and a custom CSS file. I think it looks simply Sensual as he put it. I like it so much in fact that I’m going to ask if it would be possible to make it the default and perhaps (if he’s interested) come up with some more skins (which was my plan for my blog here, but I never got around to it). I think some great things are ahead!

Alexa, part of Amazon has linked Tag Central very prominently in a recent blog entry. That drew quite a few visits. I vow that this weekend I will at least get the supporting pages up so the site isn’t quite as mysterious as it is now.

Over the past few days, I’ve the site has been in transition to a new webhost. There were lots of reasons I did this, but hopefully the process has been mostly transparent. Probably the most notable change is that Tag Central now has its own domain name, tagcentral.net. I used a bit of URL rewriting trickery to transparently forward all old style Tag Central URLs (http://godlikenerd.com/tagcentral/xxxxxxx) to the new domain. Moving it also gave me enough motivation to make a few changes that I’ve been meaning to make. First, I’ve upgraded to the latest version of MagpieRSS which seems to be a bit more tolerant of characters in feeds that don’t match the stated character encoding scheme. Right now, that’s the biggest pain in the ass for me because it means that I can’t easily test that the site still validates because those characters make the validator choke. This isn’t a problem in my site, nor is it a problem in MagpieRSS. No, it’s a problem within specific sources of the site. I’m not going to name names, but if one is putting out an RSS feed and calling it UTF-8, it should be UTF-8, damnit. ...

I’ve been getting linked and written to like crazy for Tag Central. I added BlogMarks, a very neat link site with thumbnails (thanks to Stuart for pointing it out to me). That makes the current list of supported sites: BlogMarks del.icio.us Furl Jots Flickr Smugmug 43 Things Tagsurf Next on the Agenda More sites! I’m trying to track down more tag using sites. If you know of one that I haven’t added yet, let me know. Administrative links at the bottom of the page. I’ll have to make about and contact pages at the very least. I’ll also link all the included services. Automated cleanup. I haven’t yet tackled the issue of cached data, but I’ll be doing so soon. Related tags. Matt at Oddiophile shared his related tags code and I’ll have to see how it works and preface the results with possibly related tags. Its own domain name. A Domain by any Other Name I’ll admit that “Tag Central” isn’t the most imaginative name for the page. I like Taggregator, but I can’t use that. I’m not terribly imaginative here, but I want the name (and domain name) to be cool. Suggest something groundbreaking! When I make the move to Dreamhost, I get a free domain name, so I want to make it a good one.

I got an email from Don MacAskill, CEO and Chief Geek (his words, not mine ;)) over at Smugmug. He informed that they are working on feeds for their content, which is absolutely terrific. I’ll be able to add more pictures and eliminate my little lack of inline-block support problem. As a little side-note, Don was also very friendly in his email, so anyone passionate about sharing their photos should check out their service.

I’m making Tag Central prettier. I can do all the colors and styling I want just fine. I think it’ll look super when it’s done (but then again, I’m not an artist and that will probably be painfully apparent). Anyway, I want the Flickr pictures to line the right side of the page. Then I want all the other sections to be contained within their own boxes, two per row. Old school webmonkeys would immediately think of using a table based layout. It seems natural and it would be very easy. The problem is, this is an abuse of HTML tables (and heresy when making an XHTML page). Only actual tabular data is supposed to go into tables. All presentation must be managed using CSS. There are many, many good reasons for this, not the least of which is that it makes the site more accessible. Besides, I’m new school. ...

I’ve started work on the Tag Central project I talked about previously. It currently uses the various RSS feeds that the suppported sites spit out. Unfortunately, this also means no Technorati tags. Unless I’m totally out of my mind, they don’t supply easily accessed RSS feeds. Right now, I’m not using a database, but instead just using the standard file based caching built into MagpieRSS which is processing all the feeds for me. Space may become an issue if this site becomes popular. I’d hate to not cache, but as I’m not getting paid for this yet, I can’t afford to use gigantic amounts of space. ...