Matthew Knott

I was at a tri-authority collaboration meeting today, and had a chance to explain to people what I call the three-layer model for organising content, or the three-layer content organisational model to you and me.

Layer 1: Folders

At the top of the layer is the most rigid of structures, folders. Folders are great for organising things and keeping them tidy, but if you don't know off hand where a file is, you have to search, which is only useful if you know the document title or what it might contain. Folders are great for structuring information in a narrative sense such as documents > projects > regeneration project, but this relies on a well planned structure. 

Layer 2: Categories

A good bridging layer, categories, are very similar to folders, depending on how they are used. In fact it is very easy, especially in online content, to duplicate the functionality of folders but call it categories, using endless sub categories to contain documents. True categorisation should be high level. Where categories differ from folders is that they should be single level, and documents can exist in multiple categories, where as they can only exist in a single folder. Categorisation makes browsing to a documents location quicker, but there can be a larger volume of documents, so this can make pinpointing your required information harder.

Layer 3: Tags

Tagging is essentially structureless, categorisation on steroids. Tags represent both a documents content and it's meaning, implied or otherwise. There are hundreds of these little categories. Browsing would be difficult and time consuming, but search results are accurate and valuable. Tags should be added by a documents author, their tags represent what the document means to them, but tagging systems should allow others to add tags, building the documents repertoire for multiple perspectives. This variety of tags is what makes the search process more reliable and less linear.

Usage

Your documents should be floating objects, with the three layers all being implemented as views into your documents, this way you can provide the most complete user experience.

Tags: Tags Tag Document Organisation Methodology Model Categorisation Topology

Geo-tagging is one of those things that really gets you coming up with all sorts of ideas, good and bad.

I've started using geo-tagging in the meta data of some of the sites I've been working on, and will eventually integrate it into this site.

Briefly, Geo-tagging involves linking an object to a geographic location, be it a movie, a photo, or a website. In turn this information can be plotted in mapping tools such as google maps. You could view a street and see everyones homepage URL (Would be a pretty geeky street I know). Google Maps already displays photo's linked to a geographic location and I'm sure it won't take them long to combine this with Youtube.

The Youtube tagging would have to be optional though, because I would be liable to find that Britney fan and give him a damn good shaking.

I'm planning on writing an application for the iPhone that geo-tags my blog posts for when I'm out and about, adding a small map of the area to the post. I think it'll be cool, everyone else will probably use it to track my movements and steal my iPhone...

To Generate geo-tagging meta data for your site, click here.

Tags: iPhone Tag Data Geo-Tagging Geo Geographic Geography Meta Maps

I currently use a rich text editor called Tiny MCE to write the articles for this site. When I started using it, I thought it was the bees knees, but I've come to find it has more than its fair share of drawbacks.

For one, I find myself circumventing it more and more, it strips my code tags, removes / from the beginning of internal links, and completely strips http://www.mattknott.com/ which can be annoying when you are referencing content from multiple locations!

In addition to all of this, I go into html mode a fair bit adding in syntax to try and maintain xhtml 1.0 strict adherence. There has to be an easier way.

This week I'm going to have a stab at a solution based around tag suggestion, similar to the Dreamweaver code editor, triggered by <, a list of tags appears, and refines as I continue to type. Clicking a tag will insert the text I want, the way I want it, including alt tags and title tags for images and links respectively.

I will post an update as to how I get on, as it's going to be a bit of a challenge, but with any luck it'll be something to expand upon in the future.

Tags: Syntax Standards Rich Text Editor RTE Rich_Text_Editor Dreamweaver Web_Standards Suggest Tag