Re: Flagging important or favourite posts

I think this question sheds some light on the question of 
tags or categories in pyblosxom generally.

Tags are better than categories because each story can have 
more than one tag. On the other hand, the tags plugin for 
pyblosxom only offers basic support. You cannot have 
hierarchical tags (where one tag is a child of another, so 
that any story tagged with the child tag is automatically 
treated as if it were tagged with the parent tag as well), 
whereas you can have hiearchical categories. You can only 
view one tag at once, it's not possible to select multiple 
tags and view all stories that have any of the selected tags 
or only stories that have all the selected tags. And there's 
no good interface for tagging posts, renaming tags, deleting 
tags, splitting and joining tags, etc.

I began work on a set of utilities and specs to address 
these shortcomings. It was kind of interesting but I don't 
have time to work on it anymore.

I think when it comes down to it blosxom was from the start 
a filesystem-based blog engine, and the filesystem has 
hierarchical categories, not tags. So for that reason, 
categories seem to work better with pyblosxom. They are 
better integrated into the software itself and they fit with 
the modes of use that the software was designed for. Tags 
don't.

What I found myself doing for a while was maintaining both a 
category structure and a tagcloud. But this was no good. I 
would end up with a tag and a category for the same thing, 
but not corresponding to the same set of stories. I wrote a 
script to sync the two by tagging every story with each of 
its categories. But this just adds maintenance and doesn't 
solve the problem. It was still a mess.

Maybe the right way is to use categories as your primary 
mode of organising in pyblosxom, and then use tags in only a 
limited fashion, to augment catogories? For example, having 
an "Important" tag and a "Favourite" tag. The idea here is 
to not have too many tags, don't create a tag for everything 
and have a great big tag cloud. Have only a small number of 
tags for functional rather than categorical concepts.


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