Little update - it looks like I won't need to name and shame the high street retailer who sold me a used TomTom GO 510 as "new": they replaced it and I upgraded (for an extra £40) to the 710 as they "didn't have any more 510s in stock" (uh huh? Riiight...).

The not-connecting thing seems to have been resolved by installing the TomTom Home software in an administrative account, but I'm still having the problem with settings being deleted every time I dock the TomTom on the Mac. I'm going to give the PC version a try, but I don't know for sure if my Windows box has any USB 2 ports on it (I've never needed them as it's only a file server).

Another problem on the OS X version of the TomTom Home software: I can't use the "My TomTom GO 710" option to plan routes (or do anything at all) on - it just says something along the lines of "A required component is not available...". :(

The Bluetooth problems I was having - where I could only connect to my Motorola once and then the TomTom wouldn't connect again - seem to have been fixed by installing an app from the TomTom support site called "Clear Flash".

Still, on the plus side, the iPod control works brilliantly, and I now have an extra carry case and home dock.Hell, I think it will even navigate me to places using this new-fangled GPS technology I keep seeing mentioned...

/al - happier bunny...

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...