maandag, augustus 20, 2007
Presidential tag cloud
I'm a fan of tag clouds, and you can bet your mother-in-law or something precious that my site will include one.In the mean time, check out the tag cloud made from US presidential speeches. Five seconds worth of looking at it saves you hours of listening to get the drift :-). It is based on a free tag cloud generator for time-based clouds from Chirag Mehta.
Labels: tags
zondag, mei 27, 2007
Tag Assistant update: now with spell check
I have updated the Tag Assistant component.
- You can now refresh the tag suggestions by pressing on a link. You don't have to save the page anymore. During the time of the refresh a typical web 2.0 waiting indicator is shown, courtesy of ajaxload.info.
- The suggested tags are filtered for correct spelling in the appropriate language. The spell check component I used is a completely open source .NET component called 'NetSpell', and you can find it also back on CodeProject. On the NetSpell site you will only find code that runs under .NET 1.0, so head to the CodeProject site and follow the link in the comment posted by Eric Woodruff. He has fixed some bugs and updated the code to run under .NET 2.0 as well. The spelling libraries are compiled from the OpenOffice site.
- If the tag already exists, a * is added to the suggestion. That way I hope people will use similar tags where possible.
- You can now refresh the tag suggestions by pressing on a link. You don't have to save the page anymore. During the time of the refresh a typical web 2.0 waiting indicator is shown, courtesy of ajaxload.info.- The suggested tags are filtered for correct spelling in the appropriate language. The spell check component I used is a completely open source .NET component called 'NetSpell', and you can find it also back on CodeProject. On the NetSpell site you will only find code that runs under .NET 1.0, so head to the CodeProject site and follow the link in the comment posted by Eric Woodruff. He has fixed some bugs and updated the code to run under .NET 2.0 as well. The spelling libraries are compiled from the OpenOffice site.
- If the tag already exists, a * is added to the suggestion. That way I hope people will use similar tags where possible.
Labels: about2findout, tags
zondag, mei 20, 2007
Tag Assistant
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
