I must admit that with a tiny amount of research and set up, I’ve now got something that even John Locke could be jealous of.
For my future self or others interested, I’m using Multi-column Tag Map which has a variety of short codes for implementing various forms of output. Sadly it wasn’t tagged with the word index, so it took some time to find it.
I’ve always had my own administrative interface for this data as well as search and even programmatic tag completion which makes writing and posting easier. However since a lot of what I do is in the public, perhaps it will be useful for readers to have access to the same full list instead of the abbreviated ones that appear as tag clouds or in various sidebars on the site?
Currently I’ve got over 9,000 different tags on the site. Perhaps displaying them publicly will help motivate me to curate and manage them a bit better. I already see a handful of repeated versions based on spelling, spacing, or typos that could be cleaned up. Let’s go crazy!
@chrisaldrich seems a little buggy yet. For instance, the two column layout takes a long time to generate and when I click the WordPress index item which states it has 741 items the url is https://boffosocko.com/category/wordpress/ but the page displayed is the article for the commonplace index.
WordPress | Chris Aldrich
@chrisaldrich 9000 tags! I just took a look at your index page, I think you are right…a cool index page indeed.
Thank you Chris for link to Multi-Column Tag Map. I have created my own now. I have long wanted to build a better search page that allow me to filter search using tags and text. I think that this is a useful start. It is also a useful reminder to keep on top of my tags and clean up inconsistencies.
Side note, through the process I discovered I have 147 posts tagged ‘Chris Aldrich’.
Als ik claim een Frankopedia op te zetten met dit blog, dan is het goed om een index-pagina te hebben. Een index gebaseerd op de tags die ik in meer of mindere mate gebruik bij de individuele posts. Eigenlijk is dit pas sinds 2017 meer een gewoonte geworden. Al zijn de vele post-types zoals bookmarks en likes nog tag-loos. Een klus die ik op kan pakken in mijn 365-dagen taak om per dag posts te reviewen. Ook dat lukt de ene dag beter dan de andere 😬
Voor de index-pagina gebruik ik de Multi-Column Tag plugin, dankzij een tip van Chris en Aaron. Nu nog de gewoonte opbrengen om oudere posts met terugwerkende kracht te taggen en tags te consolideren.
Via mijn Tag Index kun je lekker rondsnuffelen in het archief. Ik kies er voor om alleen tags te tonen die minimaal 2x zijn gebruikt.
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Thinking about the difference between physical commonplace books and digital ones, the ability to have an easily maintained index that references posts directly came up. Right now I have the categories of posts displayed in the WordPress footer, but I’m not totally thrilled with that presentation, and would like to display tags somewhere as well which have much more variety and specificity — but there are many more of them. I think that would help towards making this site more useful as a digital garden (whereas right now it feels pretty blog-like), in seeing which things I tend to save or think about most.
Chris Aldrich shared an index of the tags he uses on his website, using the WordPress plugin Multi-column Tag Map.
Came across Gordon Brander’s topics page which appears to manually sort tags? Looks nice.
For categories I’ve been thinking about a display of colored blocks on the homepage, with each category getting its own color that carries through the site — although many posts have more than one category so I’d have to be good about choosing the primary category to make that happen. I’ve been casually looking into WordPress themes designed for news websites since they’re often broken into categories, but haven’t found anything I liked so far.
In Annotation by Kalir and Garcia, the authors observe that several things we now see as integral to what a non-fiction book is were actually also emergent phenomena from annotation by readers. Things like labels, rubrics, glossary and index. Kalir and Garcia make much of the social aspects of annotation, and the conversations those create. I’m fond of things that generate (distributed) conversations, I blog after all, but also have reservations when it comes to sharing tentative notes, associations and other annotations.
There are steps possible however to do a little bit more in allowing others to explore what I’ve written here. And an Index is an easy enough step to make. Easy enough because I can follow the footsteps of Chris Aldrich and Frank Meeuwsen who did this last year September/October.
Like them I installed the Multi column tag map WordPress plugin. Now this blog too has an Index, which shows you the tags I’ve used the past 20 years. Or rather the tags I’ve used at least 5 times.
It’s also immediately a useful tool for myself it turns out. Some postings had all their tags joined into a single tag (an error from when I imported posts while switching from Movable Type to WordPress, a decade ago), other tags are simple variations of the same word (e.g. singular and plural). Fixing these is easy, now that the Index list has surfaced the ones that need fixing.
A photo of a book index, by Ben Weiner, license CC BY ND