Boy, have I got a project for the weekend!
While running ideas and vague concepts related to my tag-categorization wishlist of the other day, I figured it was worth poking around in the Movable Type Support Forums to see if I could find anything of use. A search for ‘keywords’ led me to one thread, which then led me to these posts by ishbadiddle — and that looks to be (nearly) exactly what I’ve been looking for!
Here’s his blog entry on his keyword subject indexing work:
My thinking about the Semantic Web was influenced by Paul Ford’s piece on the subject, which imagines the power of Google harnessing the Semantic Web to make even more money. There’s a good article on the Semantic Web on wikipedia. Basically, it’s adding metadata (data about the data) to web pages. In our case, it’s simply adding “subject” data to each blog post, and then harnessing that to create an index of posts that relate to that subject. Think of it this way: the Category system is like the Table of Contents of a book, listing chapter headings. The Keyword system is like the Index of a book, one that is constantly updated.
So, plan for the upcoming weekend:
Print out ishbadiddle’s instructions, download and install the required plugins (ifEmpty, Loop, Compare, Collate, and Regex), hack the search functions, and then start pounding away on my templates.
About the one downside I can see to this is that I may have to go back to static rendering of my pages rather than the dynamic rendering I’m using now, but I’m okay with that (it’s all a tradeoff anyway, there’s pros and cons to each approach).
It’ll be fun to get into geek mode for a little while as I work on this. I just hope I don’t break anything while I’m working on it…
“Steamroller (Steaming Pig)” by Pigface from the album In Dust We Trust (1997, 3:22).