March 13th, 2005
Tag autocompletion when posting to del.icio.us
Update:
This is a very old page imported from my previous blog. If there is missing content below or anything that doesn’t make sense then please check the page on my old blog.
I use del.icio.us to manage my bookmarks and love the way that I can get to my bookmarks from anywhere and can tag them freely and access groups of them from any browser on any computer based on my tags.
However, I found that my tags were becoming a bit of a mess for two reasons:
- Misspellings. My spelling isn’t the best and I’m sometimes a little sloppy… It would be good if I hadn’t ended up with separate tags for “inspiration” and ” inspriation”.
- Not remembering exact tags I’ve used before. I have some sites tagged with “photo” and some with “photos”. I meant the same thing when I used both tags and would prefer that I only had one of them so that I could see all the relevant sites on one page.
It occurred to me that a good way to avoid these problems would be if there was an autocomplete option (similar to “code hinting” or “intellisense” in an IDE) as you were posting pages to del.icio.us.
The same idea obviously occurred to other people and there was some philosophical debate on the del.icio.us mailing list about whether you should have something like this which “encouraged people to tag things in a way they may not see personally fit” but I think what I have built is quite useful.
Basically it will connect to delicious (through it’s api) and retrieve a list of your tags and will give you the option to autocomplete using these. You are free to use or ignore the autocomplete suggestions as you like. I feel this adds utility to the posting experience without constraining the user in any way.
To use my posting interface just create a bookmark using the
You will need the Flash player (version 6+) installed to use this posting form since I programmed it in Flash. I’ve tested the bookmarklet in Firefox 1 and IE6 on PC and it seems to work fine – please let me know if there is any problems on other systems.
Also let me know of any bugs you encounter with the system and any suggestions for improvement (this is very much a first draft). Especially please ignore the look of the form – functionality over beauty – at least at this stage :)