Homebrew Tags

It’s been a few weeks since I frequented Homebrew Website Club so instead of starting my bank holiday early I decided to stick around and hang out with the devs at Clearleft and other homebrewers and talk shop.

At the pervious brews, I’d chipped away at making my site a PWA (progressive web app) and added an offline page displaying cached pages. With only 90 mins of brewing I wanted to pick something that I could have something to write about before the evening was over so I decided to look at the way I had configured tags, categories and collections.

The inspiration for this came from two separate conversations in the Clearleft office. The first was Richard’s investigation of a current and refined IA taxonomy, the second was a conversation between Chris and Jeremy about a blog post he (Jeremy) had written and the process of using his own website’s tagging structure to retrieve it.

My site uses collections, categories and tags already so I know I had the raw material to work with, but I was a little apprehensive about the way I had implemented them in the code, I had vague recollections of employing a hack so I didn’t have to use plugins back in the day.

On closer inspection it wasn’t as bad as I thought and after writing a URL-design-first approach, I found out that I had done some of the work already with the /tagging/ page already written. Once I wasted 15 mins wondering why some tags worked while others didn’t, I added a few missing files and was away.

With a few minutes to spare I had posts, links and thoughts all including available tags.