Thanks to Flickr, I’m becoming more and more of a fan of keywords or ‘tags‘ as categorization tools. Rather than having a set number of categories or sub-categories, tags are an amazingly simple way to categorize items (such as photos on Flickr, or links on del.icio.us [which I really need to look more closely at]) just by tossing whatever descriptive terms you want into the tag field.
What I want now is a way to use tags in my Movable Type installation rather than categories. I have no idea if this is even possible with the current plugin scheme, or if it would take a lot of lower-level source code hacking (seems like it might…I’m guessing you’d need to disable MT’s category system, replace it with the tag system, remove the Category drop-down menu from the MT interface and replace it with a field for inputting tags, incorporate a tag search feature, etc.), but I’d love to see it. Even better would be if enabling the tag system in MT would automatically create a dynamically-generated tags page similar to Flickr‘s, with the top X (50? 100? 150? User-definable?) tags displayed using variable sizes, and a link to a full tag list.
Okay, I want to rip off Flickr’s entire tag system and use it on my MT blog. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right? ;)
Of course, I can’t code a “hello world” application (well, maybe in BASIC, but not in anything more complex than that), let alone tackle a project like this. But I can dream.
Barring some kind soul figuring out how to shoehorn such a thing into MT, though, do any of the current weblogging tools support tag-based categorization? I’m not entirely sure if that one feature would be enough to tempt me away from MT, but it’s obviously bouncing around my brain enough to make me ask…
Addendum: Just before posting this, I looked at the ‘Keywords’ field in the MT interface. Hmmm. Maybe all we need is a plugin to parse and interact with the keyword field that’s already there? Damn, I wish I knew more about programming…. Ideas, anyone?
Later tonight I may see what resources I can find to toss this idea into the wider MT community and see if some bigger brains than mine feel like poking around with this.
Update: Ben Hammersly is doing something similar, only rather than being an internal categorization system, it uses keywords to link to del.icio.us tags. Not quite what I’m thinking.
A comment there led me to this directory — which might be close to what I’m thinking of, though as the documentation is little more than “put it in your plugins directory”, it’s a little hard to tell what it would actually do.
No solutions yet, but apparently others have at least started looking this direction, so there’s hope…
Update: Another piece of the puzzle, and this from someone who pokes their head in here from time to time: Dan has PHP code for a weighted keyword list. Now, if those could be linked into some sort of category-like listing…