too many words by laura lemay

tags, tags, tags, and marsedit

You may have noticed that I’ve been tagging my posts here, del.icio.us-style, over the last few days. I’ve also been going back and tagging old posts, but man is that a bloody tedious bit of work. My eventual goal is to reorganize the entire site so that it can be navigated and read tag-wise, but I’m still working on that. In the meantime I’m making use of the new technorati tag aggregation features{.broken_link} so that you can go see the other blogs and pictures and links other people are tagging with the same stuff I’m tagging.

I’m using the keywords part of a movable type entry for my tags; I wrestled a lot over the benefits of using keywords versus using categories. What it came down to was simplicity; I have a lot of trouble with Movable Type’s categories because they have to be set up in MT beforehand. I’m just too darn lazy for that. I like keywords because I can just type them in on a per-entry basis, willy-nilly. We’ll see how it works in the long run, though — I may decide that the MT software really resists tagging and what I should have done was categories in the first place. And then I get to re-tag all my posts all over again. Yay.

As part of this whole tagging experiment I wrote a little applescript for MarsEdit{.broken_link} to automatically insert the “Technorati Tags” HTML at the bottom of each post (I borrowed most of it from the MarsEdit “Currently Playing in iTunes” script, and I shamelessly stole the formatting from John’s plugin that does basically the same thing on the MT side). After installing it, you use it by tagging your post and then just choosing the script from the Script menu:

The HTML goes in at the insertion point, so don’t forget to click at the end of your post before running the script. If you’ve got something selected it’ll append the tags to the end of the selection.

Download the script here (want to just criticize my applescripting? take a look). Put it into the MarsEdit Scripts folder (~Library/Application Support/MarsEdit/Scripts) and restart MarsEdit for it to work. Enjoy.