August 22, 2008

Tags and Associations

It was a late start today, but facilities for tagging and associating have been implmented. While editing it still not in place, there are still improvements to be made, but it is working for now.

Tags

  • Tags are now set on a title via the user’s dashboard: (/dashboard/tags/media/title)
  • Control posts via AJAX+API
  • It works even if no tags have been made
  • A quick “Tag This” was place on the media page
  • TODO: tag option in table row dropdowns
  • TODO: XML mix between experience and tags (tag filter on experience)
  • TODO: tag view on title’s main page
  • TODO: most used tags on tagging panel

Associations

  • Associations can be set via the media’s associated page (/media/title/associated)
  • Adding uses traditional POST form
  • The firefox extension is working for associating pages while browsing
  • TODO: editing/removing associations
  • TODO: quick list of a user’s associations in dropdown table control

One bug that can easily be fixed is that tagging does not flush the tags, it merely adds the new tags. Also, when tagging, the newly added tags are not fed into the HTML, and a page refresh is needed, but that is optional at this point.

August 21, 2008

Feature: Associate

What is it?

Previously, melative used a “linkage” system, similar to del.ico.us, though links were posted on media-titles. There was no use of tags, simply sending URIs at titles. Associations are similar to this in that they do not use tags, but are still a kind of bookmark. The key difference is the added value of relation.

Relation is an enumerated value that describes the relations between the URI and the title. It may be a minute detail, but it allows for significant data.

Key Attributes

Certain elements are required, but relation is optional (defaults to ‘general’).

uri
address to be associated
title
page title, or short description of uri
relation
enumeration: general, article, audio, feed, forum, journal, review, video, defaults to general

Example

uri: http://pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/16230/cLOUDDEAD_cLOUDDEAD
title: Pitchfork Review of cLOUDDEAD
relation: review

This will “bookmark” the uri as review on the musical album cLOUDEAD.

Very simple, no? The purpose of this is that melative acknowledges vast resources around the net, but does not intend to compete by hosting videos, audio, articles, reviews, etc. Rather, melative associations act as a resource of resources, leading users to useful, user-associated data.

Future

Of course, one future aspect is voting on the usefulness or quality of an association. Theoretically, voting could connect an association to another user’s group of associations, thus “bookmarking” with the same attributes as the primary association, but without a direct entry; (multiple users can associate the same uri, with different titles and relations, but this would allow associating based on a previous association).

note: that last bit may seem confusing