Alex Harries's diary

I've spent the last 5-ish hours re-writing some of the code that works out whether you want to only see blog entries by a certain person tagged with a certain keyword/s, which means there shouldn't be more than about another 10 hours' work left to properly turn on the blog tagging system.

What's a tag, and why is it important? Tags are keywords assigned to a blog entry. This means that large, monolithic blogs with lots of entries about loads of different things can now be broken up using tags. For example, I could tag posts about the website with "UPSU.net", and tag random rubbish with a "ramblings" tab. This is important if we're going to make the UPSU blogs really attractive to people who want to write blogs here.

The way tags will actually do their job is through the URLs. Currently, a blog's URL is something like "upsu.net/blogs/alexh/YYYY/MM/DD". To only show blog entries in 2007 tagged with "noodle", the URL would be "upsu.net/blogs/alexh/noodle/2007" (and it works, too...), and you can still use the old style URLs.

Each entry can have more than one tag, so the same entry might show up in several searches - handy if a blog entry covers more than one topic.

Browsing tags will happen by showing the top few tags for each blog entry at the bottom of the entry, and also by showing the most-used ten-ish tags in a small tag cloud in the diary links bar, which will also give an overview of the blog's main topics.

Or this could all be an exercise in the introduction of a whole host of new security loopholes in the website... Uh oh...

The "Other" thing

A blog is nothing without a central place to review your blog entries. Part of my profile re-write includes creating a blog "dashboard" which lets members set up how their blog looks and see all their blog entries at a glance. But that'll have to wait a little while longer...

I've just been pressured into signing up for a facebook account. I'm trying to figure out if I can add more than one e-mail address to the same account as I've had a few invites to a few different e-mail addresses, and until now I've avoided signing up thanks to the "MySpace effect" (or, for the uninitiated, "let's all get ourselves a free but really crap-looking* webpage with Rupert Murdoch's advertising all over it which forces everyone in the world to register for an account just so they can read my really boring blog entries and find out just what a sad-case I am**").

* Yes, I know some MySpace pages look very pretty, but they're definitely in the minority.

** ... and yes, I've spotted the irony in that statement, coming from someone who writes a blog about his work pushing pixels around a website without seeming to actually *do* anything at all. Ever...

So, anyway, I have a Facebook account. Now all I have to do is figure out how, if it's at all possible, we can (a) integrate it into peoples' profiles (have a "my Facebook name" field? An optional "my latest Facebook news" feed on peoples' profile pages? Or...?), and (b) (assuming it turns out to be worth the hype, which it might just be...), to find a way of dropping some hints into UPSU.net about how cool it is, especially since it's aimed squarely at the more transient student communities (and rightly so).

"What I Dun This Crimbo" 

While I'm working that all out (ok, so I'll probably forget about it for a month or so and then come back and rush into it instead), have I mentioned some of the other things I've been fiddling with over Christmas? No? Open wide and say "ahh" then...

• Introduced an "account dashboard" kinda thing - sign in and go to upsu.net/profile to see a summary of your account.
  
  This was the first step in my plan to start creating a coherent, navigable set of webpages which "belong" to each member and is one of the many (currently around 30) tools I've created in the "UPSU Toolbox" - my attempt at a collection of toys to add a whole load of functionality to UPSU, including the beginnings of the tag search system.
  
  
• Changed the way peoples' profiles are found -they're now at upsu.net/people/<username> instead of upsu.net/community/members/<member ID>.htm - much more Google-able.
  
  
• Changed, added and generally hacked about with the URL rewriting system (an endless job, I think...), while simultaneously introducing a stripped-down template layout (not entirely dissimilar in design principles to Flickr's layout if I must be honest) and re-writing a lot of the profile handler code to make everything look vaguely familiar, if not quite uniformly laid out, for example the profile pages, profile picture pages, photo upload pages, and so on.
  
  This means it should be a lot easier to navigate around peoples' profiles, with URLs like "upsu.net/people/alexh" for my main profile, "upsu.net/alexh/picture" to see my photo in full size (not that anyone in their right mind ought to be doing that - it's like one of the less pretty scenes from Deliverance, I'm told...), "upsu.net/people/alexh/blogs" to see my blog entries (although I haven't done that bit yet as it's part of the profile handler re-write, mentioned below...), and so on...
  
  
• Spent an inordinate amount of time separating out what information people maintain for their account (private information - name, address,in...
  
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