Obfuscure Blog

Semantic wordpress tagging

Greatest. Wordpress plugin. Ever.

I say this with great knowledge and insight - I wrote it after hearing about Calais. Now for the back story.

Every time I write something and I get ready to post I go through the pre-publish checks - is my spelling and grammar OK (probably not), is it cohesive and does it read well (once again probably not), and what tags am I going to put on it.

You know, those little tidbits of information that pigeon hole your post, so that it makes sense in this hurly-burly world. Now this is the bit I don’t like, I mean c’mon, it took all my mental nous just to right the bloody post and now you want me to tag it.

So with this in mind I set about creating something to do the hard work for me.

First step was to grab the Open Calais PHP class, kindly provided by Dan Grossman, allowing me to pass the precious post to the Open Calais API.

Second step was to write a plugin to integrate neatly into the wordpress admin, just like it had always been there. So I quickly coded it up and volia! Oh, wait, thats-not-how you write a wordpress plug in.

Now let me digress from this back story for a minute. This is my first wordpress plugin. I have never coded one before, nor have I used jquery before (I’m a prototype man). So be gentle.

So back to the back story, I had rejigged the plugin into a format suitable for a king and/or wordpress. So with the back story out of the way, lemme explain the plugin. Essentially it is the same as Dan Grossman’s calais-auto-tagger with the subtle differences being in the interface.

Now you may wonder why I would make a plugin when there is already one doing an admirable job. I would respond threefold:

1. I did not realise there was already a plug in doing the same thing (even though I went to Dan’s site to download the PHP class - palm to forehead).
2. I wanted to have a muck about with some semantic stuff, and this is a pretty gentle way to get into it.
3. Everyone must write a wordpress plug in before they die.

Given those compelling responses just try and resist downloading the plug in. I dare you.

tagger.zip

P.S. I totally tagged this post using it.