Tags feature for DG?

June, I think the computer era is passing us by. I kid you not I'd never even heard the word tag until I started reading this thread. I can assure you I'd be hung up on the Favorites myself had I not realized I wanted to be able to add little notes to myself about why I wanted to be able to look back to a specific thread for personal reference. Sort of worked out to my benefit this time because my Favorites are all in my Diary here. Think I would have about passed out if I had logged on one day and found my Favorites converted to this tag deal.

I found with Favorites that I had to change the title to really know why I saved it, or even go and find a particular individual post and rename it. When I first started using it, I just left it as titled but it wasted time to go look at it later to figure out why I had saved it.
It's the same with tags, I found I needed to make it as descriptive as possible in one or two tag words.
I agree, having both options available would be nice.

Equilibrium - My husband and I both work in high-tech businesses, but I agree that it's a challenge to keep up. We're savvy on computer technology, but dismally behind in digital camera technology and HDTV right now. DH keeps up more on this than I do because he actually develops computer programs for corporations. I just do "the pretty work". ;-)

June

I'm in, and thanks to GW for bringing this useful idea to the Garden!

I have a suggestion for categorizing the tags. How about listing your tags as a major category followed by the specific item in that category? Example: Recipes: Runzas; Seeds: Starting; Seeds: Germinating; Tomatoes: Black Krim; and so on and so on. Just a suggestion.

Dave,
Is there a way to have our personal cloud alphabetize the entries for easy perusal down a list? THANKS in advance, if this can be done!

Linda

Never mind the alphabetizing! Duh! It's already in alpha order. Can a personal cloud be set up as a columnar display?

Calif_Sue,

You are very welcome. Glad you were able to figure it out. It's easy to do but not so easy to explain. (Oh, and glad to hear that you are enjoying the raccoon saga!)

I'm noticing a strange and growing 'problem' in which tags in the general cloud say "No items found" when clicked. What's up with that? How can a tag exist but have no items associated with it? Is this growing list of 'empty' tags the result of the new option which allows people to make some tags private; or are they the result of some kind of error in the system?

I don't like all of these empty tags floating around. They tempt me with the promise of interesting info and then let me down. Here's an example: jazz's quick chicken. Now I want to see this chicken recipe, but the tag contains no info or at least none that I can view. What could be so private about a recipe? (There are plenty more.)

Gee, I just noticed that a post I had created in my "personal tags" is also included in the main tags. I tagged it for myself because it mentioned a specific paint color that I wanted to remember, but I'm not sure that person would appreciate having her entire post in the main tags. People do talk a lot on DG and often include personal stuff in their posts. That's not so in the example of my paint color tag but it made me uncomfortable to realize that I had just put someone's comments out there where she had not intended them to be.

June

June,

But the thread and all of the information in it is out there already for all of the DG world to see regardless of your tag. The people 'talking' there have no expectation of privacy. They have no idea who may be lurking/reading the thread. The thread shows up on the "Recent Posts" list at the bottom of the home page every time someone posts to it (or elsewhere for those who have moved things around).

Scutler - I know you're absolutely correct, which is why I'm often startled at how much people reveal about themselves in the DG community. Not to go off topic here, but many threads develop such a feeling of "family" that a perception of privacy evolves which is untrue. DG is certainly one of the most secure and best managed of web sites though, and for that I am grateful.

June

While I don't want to be negative about the tag feature, because I see so many people like it and use it, I think it's rather overwhelming for me and I will probably not use it other than for my own tags.

One reason is that there are way too many now for me to wade through, and it's only the first week. I wonder just how many there are now. Thousands?

Then when I did spot some topics that might be interesting, they ended up "blank" (as others have mentioned), or else completely not what I was expecting. I found that I actually visited only a few of all the links I thought I would.

Like June, or someone, said above...the large sized clouds catch my eye all the time, which is no doubt what they are supposed to do, but for some silly reason I find that annoying. I will probably pull the "new tags" feature off my homepage.

Bottom line. I miss the old Favorites. I'm sorry.

I think that many are trying it out and quickly adding new tags when they could easily fit into already existing tags and so it's becoming too big too fast. I regret that I entered too many rose bloom ones, each with a month. They all would fit better under just 'rose blooms' and there by take up less room. I am going to go through mine and condense them.

I still can't figure it out. (Older Blonde here!) I tagged one thread and can't even remember which one it was. I do remember getting a message about Thank you for adding a tag or something. But, where do I find the tag? And what are these "Clouds" y'all are talking about?? I'm really confused!

plantladylin, click your name or My Info tab and you'll see the 'View Your tagged pages'. (Remember anything you do will show up in your info page) If you do several, it becomes your personal 'cloud' of tags. To see all the ones already created by everyone, click>My Tools tab and on the right side in the 'My Tools' box, you'll see 'Tags'. Click on that and you will now be overwhelmed! :-)



This message was edited Jan 15, 2008 7:18 PM

My understanding was that Dave had asked us to start tagging enough things to create a database of tags for him to work with. He would then create some search tools for use with these tags, so that we could find what we're looking for.

I can sure see advantages to both the new tags and the old "favorites" system--it seems to me like they will each have a place, and be useful for different things.

Personally, I'm having fun with these new tags, and especially like the ability to tag a single post in a thread--so often there's something very specific I want, but trying to wade through a thread of a couple hundred posts can get unwieldy.

Calif_Sue: Thank You!

Ok, is there a way to remove any of the tags you have saved on your info page? I only tagged one for Amaryllis and this is what it shows: http://davesgarden.com/tools/tags/tag.php?tag=amaryllis
Four different entries, two that are duplicates and one that doesn't seem to have anything at all to do with amaryllis (I looked through the thread and didn't see anything regarding amaryllis.) I would like to save the Amaryllis 101 and Detailed information on Amaryllis but the other two need to go bye bye.

Any hints on how to remove them? I can't even see anywhere to delete any or all of them once they've been tagged.

Yup, I'm finding that annoying now too Lin, I have clicked on a tag or three and found totally irrelevant information, or a blank page. It's turning into a mass of confusion.

Tucsonjill, you're correct -- Dave did say he is going to develop browsing tools to work with the tags. I bet the cloud is just one of those tools.

I'm sure over time the kinks will be worked out. I'm assuming the one I would like to delete has the name amaryllis somewhere in the thread.


This message was edited Jan 16, 2008 7:55 AM

Might I speak in defense of the "tag" process, which is ongoing? Sure, there will be bugs, and kinks, and issues to be worked out, but has Dave's responsiveness and openness to the whole idea of orchestrating a well-oiled search engine here at DG been truly appreciated?

To the Ones who know how to use the tags: Thank you for the suggestions for improvement.

To the Ones who know how to use the tags: Thank you for trying to help out the ones of us who are tag "challenged'

To the Ones who know how to use the tags: Thank you for your patience with this development

To the Ones who do NOT know how to use the tags: Please be as patient with the process as you are in the garden...

To the Ones who do NOT know how to use the tags: Please give it a chance. Everything you ever learned was new to you before you learned it

To the Ones who do NOT know how to use the tags: Remember the giving spirit of the DG members. SOMEONE, sooner or later, will attempt to come to your aide, as they always have in the DG garden.

Linda, "who will try to help others of you as best I can, even though I have NEVER used tags before, and who is computer literate enough to figure it out by trial and error and reading what the helpful people are posting..."

tag. you're it.

I am looking forward to being able to search the forums better with the tags. I have tried numerous times, spent mucho time, and even when I knew which forum the info I was looking for was in, I usually didn't find it. Found tons of stuff that was totally irrelevant to my search, rarely anything that was. I actually found it was easier and more efficient to search DG from Google.

As I get the time, I'm going to convert my Favorites over to tags. Yes, I agree that it will take time for this all to evolve, and it will take time for the new tag system to settle in. So patience, people! But I believe, in the final analysis, it wil be a better system than the original search system, and I welcome it.

Karen

I do understand that it will be easier and more convenient for those of you that will use it. What I am not understanding is why we can't have both features?

I too would like both features. Favorites was already in place. Seems not difficult to add Tags as an extra feature. Perhaps Admin can give the answer to this and I'll stop fussing. ;-)

I hadn't heard that Tags were going to replace Favorites. I'm sure that Dave will take everything into consideration when making changes or adding/removing things to the site. I am pretty technically challenged so will always be asking for help when it comes to new stuff! I am all for new stuff, especially when it makes navigating around the site and finding things easier!

Dave tends this garden well and it is growing and flourishing!



A Huge Thank You to everyone who is always so willing to help my lil old pea picking, blonde brain understand this stuff! My husband is the computer geek in this family and knows the ins and outs of Mac's! He's a college professor but he can't seem to teach me anything about the computer ... I always end up getting frustrated and mad and not wanting to deal with it. So, I appreciate y'all who can explain things in an easy way for me to "get" it!

When you tag something, a note says

So yes, tags replace favorites.

Why not have both? It's up to Dave to decide if favorites (in any form or fashion) will come back, but I kinda doubt it, for a couple reasons:

1) The system already stores a lot of stuff. Not to get too technical, but consider that DG consists of

~4,500,000 posts (and I-don't-know-how-many images);
165,000 entries and 175,000 images in PlantFiles & BugFiles;
20,000+ entries in Botanary, Gardenology & Insectipdedia:
22,000 entries (and over 37,000 comments) in Garden Watchdog & Go Gardening

Plus the member tradelists, dmails, blogs, journals, articles, videos, etc.

In addition to storing the files themeslves, other storage considerations include:

- The various search engines have to index all these, which means server space to keep track of where all that stuff is, and whenever somebody asks for it, fetching it for them.

- On each other's member pages, we can get to the threads that member has started.

- From our own member pages, we can instantly link to all the posts we've made.

- Tagging them means storing a link for them in another location. Having the "favorites" option means yet another storage space demand.

2) We also have to look at what makes sense for our members, and not overwhelm people with too many choices.

(Think of it this way: Baskin Robbins offers 31 flavors. I don't know why they settled on 31, but they did. When a new flavor comes out, they have to choose which flavor to retire or risk gradually growing to 310 flavors (or 3,100 or 31,000) trying to please everyone ;o)

Well said, Terry! Great illustration (B-R retiring a flavor to make room for a newer, perhaps BETTER flavor!)

Thanks, Terry. I can understand Dave's challenges. Doesn't work for me but I'll print out my current Favorites so I don't lose them.

June

June, the old favorites feature worked almost identically to both IE and Firefox's bookmarks, so if you pull up each thread/post/etc. and click on the bookmark link you can quickly set up a filing system for them in your browser ;o)

Hmm ... I just went to the "My Info" page and see in the box labeled "Your Actions" that I have a list of favorites. I've begun deleting them since I know which forums are my favorites. I guess I was taking up space there since I didn't even remember I had a list of favorites.

Thank you Terry for explaining why we can't have both. I guess I will be doing a whole lot of printing as I still do not understand the tagging process. Hope ink goes on sale...LOL...I suppose those of us who will never use this feature will have to find another way to save the information that we want.
Now does this mean that what we already have in favorites will soon be gone?

Terry, that's what I'll be doing! Please don't delete the Favorites from the system without announcing it. It will take a little time for me to transfer them to my browser.

Thanks,
June

I'm not sure if (or when) the "archived" favorites will go away, but they are "frozen" so you can't add any new ones to that area.

Before you start printing anything, I really (REALLY) recommend checking out your browser's "bookmark" feature if you liked "favorites".

It works just like the "favorites" feature did, and if you move your old "favorites" into the bookmarks, you can get to those old favorites with a click, and add new favorite posts/threads to it in the future.

In my browsers Favorites or Bookmarks, I add separate folders so the list doesn't get too long. I have a 'Daylily', 'Roses', 'Tropicals', 'Nurseries' folders among others. very easy to use.
Tags (labels) are also easy, and if you want, you can tag them with words like the above browser bookmarks and add your user name or something distinct and mark them 'private' so they stay in your tag page, just like Favorites used to.
I'm sure Dave will fine tune it so that your personal tags are just visible to you on your Info page, just like favorites used to be.
I hope those that are still not understanding at least give it a try. Any bumps or questions along the way and there are plenty here to help you get those basic steps.

Sue - I've got some of my Favorites transferred to my browser booksmarks now. You can change the titles easily when you bookmark them so they're more identifiable.

Where there's a will, there's a way. ;-)

June

I am just one of those people that if you are not sitting right here to show me step by step how to do it, I will be lost. And I just learned that to use my Bookmarks feature on my browser, (which I have never had a use for either), I have to go through creating an account. Big hassle, not worth all that.......

If you're concerned about losing your bookmarks from your browser, you might consider using an online bookmarking service such as Google's: http://google.com/bookmarks There are dozens of such services: http://www.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/On_the_Web/Web_Applications/Bookmark_Managers/ The best thing about them is you can access them from whatever computer you're using, nice if you use multiple computers. If you're going to store your bookmarks on your computer using your browser, make sure to export them every so often to back them up. Your browser will have instructions on how to do this in its help file.

Bhaugh, you shouldn't have to make an account to save bookmarks from within your browser. What browser do you use?

??? What browser are you using? I have never heard of that.
I have both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox (my favorite) and all I do when I am on a page I want to save, no matter where I am on the Internet, I simply click the Bookmarks or favorite button at the very top (next to the File Edit View History etc bar) and it's pops up a small window where you can rename the link or keep it as shown and I can also click on any sub-folder I have created to drop it in. That's it.

You can D-mail me, I'd be happy to give you a basic step by step :-)