Learning2.0 : Journey to about2findout.com

Tagging is one of the most essential elements of a web2.0 site.

I have wasted a lot of time on this, but my about2findout.com project will have a Tag Assistant. Where ever you can put tags, a collapsible assistant provides some help on tag syntax and suggests tags based on your content. All you have to do is click on one or more of the suggested tags to add them.

How does it work? The collapsible panel is a feature of the AJAX toolkit. The tag edit box itself only allows approved characters such as a-z, A-Z, 0-9, _, - and a comma to separate tags. That is a feature of the FilteredTextBoxExtender in the same toolkit.

At present, the suggested tags are a tag cloud based on the frequency of words in the text you typed in on the various fields of the page.
- I have used parts of the TextSearch project on CodeProject.com for breaking the text into words.
- I have added stopwords for English, Dutch, French, German, Italian and Spanish to the filter mechanism of the word breaker. You can find back the stopword lists for many languages on ranks.nl.
- The tag cloud itself is the cloud component from Rama Krishna Vavilala on Codeproject.com. I have wasted a day on this component but could not find a better one. Basically the component has bugs when not used with a datasource, and a click on any other component on the page makes it disappear on a postback.

Later on, I want to add more intelligence and spell check to the component, and suggestions as you type on existing tags. But for now this component allows to add tags with a few clicks, and that is not bad.

Labels: about2findout, tags