February 6th, 2009
As we change servers, some of the tags have to be ported over by hand. Everything added via Twitter with the “@tagalus define __ as ___” syntax was moved automatically, but anything added with and OpenID or a Twitter login to http://tagal.us is taking a little longer to move over. If you added a tag or definition and it’s not up on the new site, it will be soon.
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February 5th, 2009
After a long wait, Tagalus has been completely rewritten from scratch. Originally, the code was written from scratch (no framework) in PHP. The code was somewhat buggy (hey, we warned you it was beta); apparently, users were experiencing sporadic errors when trying to add tags from the web interface, although adding from Twitter seemed to work fine.
The new version of Tagalus was written in Ruby with the Rails framework. #RoR and the MVC framework turns out to be a very logical way to store tags, definitions, and comments, plus the abstraction from the database layer will mean less errors when dealing with parsing and sanitization of user input.
Another benefit of the rewrite is it’s now easier to add features on the developer end. This means that users will see more features soon, including an API for grabbing tags and definitions.
For now, head over to the site and start defining some tags!
Tags: MVC, PHP, RoR
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January 30th, 2009
Google is a powerful tool for finding information quickly. However, it has a couple of shortcomings. A significant one is that if your search term is not unique to a specific subject or item, it can be difficult to narrow your search to what is contextually relevant. Here’s an example:
A jazz fan is searching for information on Mike Davis, a drummer he heard in New York. Unfortunately, searching for just “Mike Davis” leads to millions of results, with results on the drummer burried deep within them. Narrowing down the search by adding terms like “drummer” and “new york” eventually lead to relevant pages.
When searching for the meaning of a (hash)tag on Twitter, Flickr, or other services, this problem can be compounded by the fact that deciding on contextual terms can be difficult if you don’t know the meaning of the tag in the first place. Here’s the real-world example that recently happened with @tagalus:
The tag #tss was trending on Twitter, but a cursory scan of the tweets didn’t reveal anything about what #tss meant. Googling the term led to results mostly dealing with “toxic shock syndrome” and tampon websites. It seemed unlikely that such a subject would be trending on Twitter, so @tagalus sent out a request for a definition. #tss turned out to stand for “Teleseminar Secrets” (a course going on at the time), but this didn’t come up anywhere near the top of Google search results. But, if someone had defined the tag on @tagalus early on, curious parties could check @tagalus for a definition if (or before) checking Google didn’t yield interesting results.
This leads to two conclusions:
- Define your tags on Tagalus!
- Consider avoiding coining hashtags that lead to feminine hygiene products when googling the acronym, unless that’s actually what your hashtag relates to
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January 19th, 2009
We updated the look of Tagalus today making the ‘widgets’ (the boxes that displays images, tweets, etc) a bit more noticable.
More updates are coming soon, with an easier and more user-friendly interface for adding tags, definitions, and comments.
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January 15th, 2009
We’re gearing up for some big updates and style changes soon, but for now, there’s just a minor update to announce:
The “View more tweets” button now sends visitors to http://twitter.tagal.us to view real-time results of Twitter searches, removing the need to click “refresh” like search.twitter.com requires. While there, feel free to log in and try out the Twitter client itself rather than just using it for searching.
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December 31st, 2008
Obviously, one of the most important features of Tagalus is to be able to easily set definitions of a tag. Right now, that can be done in two ways: via the website or via Twitter. A couple of users have recently encountered errors where their tags were added, but the definitons were lost. Today, both tagal.us and @tagalus are adding more advanced parsing techniques to try to ensure that this doesn’t happen again!
If you do encounter a problem using Tagalus, send us an e-mail? tagalus [at] gmail [dot] com
Thanks!
Tags: bug fixes
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December 22nd, 2008
There were a couple public mentions of Tagalus today (thanks @brampitoyo!), marking the first public day of use. There aren’t many tags or definitions up yet - please help us out by adding what you can! All you need is an OpenID to login and start using Tagalus.
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There’s a new Tagalus extension for Firefox that you can use with Twitter. If you use the Twitter web interface, the extension will turn all the hashtags into links to the tag’s page on Tagalus. Right now, the extension is in the “experimental” phase on the Mozilla site, which will change once there are a few downloads and reviews. It also means that you have to log in to the Mozilla website to download it. It’s free and quick, so why not? If you do, please take a moment to write a review of the plugin.
There is a new feature on