Shaun R. Haber

This post will wrap up my self-satisfying site addition series so I can get on to posting more ‘fun’ content.

One thing I really like about Ethan’s blog (blackrimglasses.com) is his running links in the sidebar. He uses this area to collect random information and write a small commentary about each find.

I have essentially been doing the same thing within del.icio.us. Anytime I find a site that interests me, I bookmark it for future reference.

Now, any web-savvy geek knows that del.icio.us heavily uses a tagging system in which its users create an ever emerging and evolving folksonomy of keywords for each and every bookmarked site. However, del.icio.us also provides a useful ‘Notes’ field for each bookmark, a feature that tends to be overlooked.

I’ve recently started using the Notes field to add a small commentary for each of my bookmarks. This is particularly useful when the page title reveals very little about the site content. It is also useful for keeping my tag cloud somewhat controlled, as I can use any tag-unworthy words in the Notes field since it gets indexed along with the tags. This aids future findability, should I want to search my bookmarks using a keyword that is not one of my tags.

My (15 most recent) del.icio.us links are in the sidebar, along with their notes. Though most of my bookmarks are web-related (my top three tags right now are css, web, and design), I do occasionally bookmark fun sites and stuff. Check them out!

I made some additions to the site over the last few days. The first one I’d like to mention is the Archives page.

This page uses the Extended Live Archives Plugin. It’s uses ajax to let the user browse through an entire archive of posts without needing to reload the page. Of course, since I only have a handful of entries, this is of little significance. However, for blogs with hundreds (or thousands) of posts, this is a really nice tool to have for improving usability.

The beauty of this plugin is that it essentially comes pre-configured with the k2 theme. This makes things really easy for me; I don’t have to worry about the code.

Unfortunately, when things go wrong, I do need to worry about the code. Moreover, it is not easy to debug someone else’s code.

Thus, I had a slight problem with the Live Archives plugin in Safari. When I activated the plugin, it caused each page to ‘flicker’ on loading. This didn’t happen in Firefox. Additionally, pages took longer to load with the plugin activated.

One issue going on here is how WordPress works with plugins. WordPress processes all the code for each active plugin, even on pages where those plugins aren’t used. The Live Archive plugin is only used on the Archives page, so it would be nice if WordPress somehow knew not to process any of its code unless the user was viewing the Archives page.

To implement this, I modified the plugin code in the af-extended-live-archive.php file. I wrapped an if statement around the content of each function that checks what page the user is viewing.

Example:

function af_ela_function_name() {
    if (is_page('archives')) {
         // function code here
    }
}

If the user is viewing the Archives page, then all of the Live Archive’s plugin code will be processed. If not, the code is merely skipped over.

This eliminates the Safari ‘flicker’ problem on all pages except for the Archives page. It also prevents a degrade in site performance, enabling faster browsing between pages.

A quick analysis on what’s causing the Safari ‘flicker’: My first thought was that it’s a css-related issue, but after a couple tests, it looks like it’s a javascript issue. Rather than waste time trying to fix a silly bug, I settled for the work-around above (which I feel is a better solution anyway since it keeps page loads faster).

Tonight I went through all my delicious bookmarks in an effort to normalize my tags.

I’ve been using del.icio.us for the last 5 months, and have since bookmarked many sites. I’ve been liberal with my tagging, perhaps too liberal, and ended up with a large tag cloud scattered with the noise of fragmented tags.

I had some reduntant tags like ‘reference’. Since all my del.icio.us bookmarks are sites I would refer to, there is no need have this as a tag. I also had a lot of obscure and unnecessary tags, basically keywords that were the names of random companies, applications, projects, etc.

All this was to be expected, however, since the tag cloud grows organically from the bottom-up and it takes time for common keywords to emerge. I knew all along I would need to throw out the noise and give myself a solid grounding of keywords. The result is an emergent tagging vocabulary.

This vocabulary of course is by no means static, and I expect it will evolve into a fragmented mess once again. I’ll check back in 5 months.

The snapshot is how my tag cloud looks as of now.