Can I tag along?
Yesterday’s serendipitous discovery of TagCloud has led to a few other developments since then :p I realized after watching my tag cloud for a while yesterday that it wasn’t changing at all – it was simply displaying the tags for wordsmith.org and nothing at all from my own blog entries. So I decided to do some digging to see what was going on. I still am not sure what exactly is wrong with TagCloud because I had assumed that the Yahoo Content Analysis service basically went through your site and figured out what the relevant tags for your entries were instead of you having to set up tags for each entry. However, nothing seemed to be happening – maybe their indexing service was slow or maybe it wasn’t functional. All I know is that even after 24 hours, my site was not displaying any tags.
So, I decided to look for alternatives tailored specifically towars WordPress 🙂 Or more accurately, I wanted to find something for WP which would generate tags in case I was wrong about TagCloud and they actually needed the tags somehow explicitly specified in the RSS feed. That was when I came across this blog post – now here was a solution (and a total solution at that :p) to what I’d been looking for. So I went over to the Ultimate Tag Warrior page, downloaded the plugin and installed it. I removed my existing TagCloud entry on my blog and added my own personalized tag cloud for my site. But nothing still showed up!
Why not? Because none of my entries had existing tags :p So now I had to find a way to add the tags to get a tag cloud. I spent a little time doing the entries by hand and trying to figure out what tags to assign before giving it up as too time consuming. The Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin does have a button which is supposed to retrieve the suggested tags for each entry from Tagyu but for some reason, the button wouldn’t work – at least at my end. I decided to go through the source and see what was happening and if necessary, write a plugin of my own which would connect to Tagyu and pull suggested tags for each entry at the time of publishing. Perhaps I could adapt the system to also go through all my existing entries and add tags …. So I have a new project to work on … Not that I really wanted one but oh well, need something to keep life interesting, right? :p