tagthe.net blog

Tag the Bird 1.2 out

Paul Alexandrow — 2007-08-07T13:57:00Z

Yet another release of Tag the Bird is available. Version 1.2 fixes the long known problems on Unix systems.

Get it here.

Tag the Bird 1.1 out

Paul Alexandrow — 2007-07-31T08:01:00Z

Since Thunderbird 2.0 got released, more and more people kept asking me for an update of Tag the Bird, because TB's built in tagging obviously sucks.
So the new version of Tag the Bird got approved by Mozilla yesterday.

Tag the Bird is now compatible with Thunderbird 2.0
Added French locales
Added support for IMAP accounts - finally! :)

Get it here.

And while waiting for approval of 1.1, I almost finished work on 1.2, which will be fixing the current UNIX related problems! Stay tuned.

Some server problems, we are working on it...

Benjamin Ferrari — 2006-10-03T10:17:00Z

We are experiencing some problems with the server right now that cause tagthe.net to not work reliable. :(

Please be patient while we are fixing the problems.

-- ben

Update:

It seems that a recent server upgrade introduced a known bug in the Java Hotspot Compiler.

There is a workaround for the bug so I hope everything is fine again.

There will be some unusual server load for the next hours because I will run some tests. But this should not affect your programs.

The power/challange of choice

Benjamin Ferrari — 2006-09-19T07:07:00Z

One problem with public web services is that if you depend of them in your software, you are pretty much screwed if the service is cancelled for some reason. The solution is to have alternative services by hand you can switch to.

For example, when the tag extraction service tagyu shut down, codewarrior, the popular tagging plugin for wordpress went down too.

Fortunately, it is relative easy to change the plugin so it uses tagthe.net instead of tagyu. We did this in January, and Jay has some instructions on how to change the service in more recent versions.

As for tagthe.net, it has become a very successful service for knallgrau and we are using it within several of our own applications, like blogr.com or wahlblogs.at. So our plans are definitely to keep the service running and continually improve it.

However, this does not mean that the world couldn't use more text extraction services. Choice is always a good thing, and this is especially true with web services.

And if you happen to have a plan for a service that is similar to tagthe.net, please consider a interface similar to ours, or contact us so we can talk about a common interface that fits both our needs. There is nothing worse for an application developer than to write two different interface codes for two services that actually do the same thing.

Economy Chat

Thomas Hammerl — 2006-08-21T10:18:00Z

Economy Chat is a django web application developed by Zilbo that aggregates many different blogs on economy. It contacts tagthe.net in order to tag the aggregated content. Besides it's got integrated support for such fancy stuff as user ratings and nicely integrates with services like del.icio.us and reddit. Check it out to get some inspiration for what you might want to use tagthe.net for.

Tag the Bird News

Paul Alexandrow — 2006-06-26T09:17:00Z

Guess what! TTB1.0 finally got approved by the Mozilla staff and is available right here: Tag the Bird 1.0 - Tagging in Thunderbird.
Don't forget to uninstall RC1 manually, if you got that installed.

Enrico Stahn joined the TTB Team and will implement two features he proposed:

tagging of multiple messages
filter based autotagging

Olivier Marcé was so kind to send me a French translation for TTB. It will be part of v1.1. Thank you!

Talking about v1.1: I hope very much that this version will be the first to feature IMAP support. I think I will be able to release it until the end of July. Stay tuned!

Tag the Bird 1.0 rc1

Paul Alexandrow — 2006-06-07T12:44:00Z

Tag the Bird enhances Mozilla Thunderbird with the crucial feature of tagging and tag based searching.

I hereby give rc1 for Tag the Bird 1.0 to the world!

Wow, it shines!
Changelog:

Tags are now stored in the X-Tags header of a message. This gives us truely searchable Tags!
The "Add Tag" dialog has been dropped and been replaced by a completely new "Edit Tags" dialog.
Dimensions have been dropped.
A couple of new Options.
Lots of bugfixes.
More lots of little tweaks and enhancements regarding speed, stability and compatibility.

Download: Tag the Bird v1.0 rc1

Alternative download available in the SVN repository.

I recommend you uninstall your prior versions of Tag the Bird, restart your Thunderbird, and install v1.0 rc1 after that. It should not make any difference though.

Important notes:

Though this release has been carefully tested, it's a release candidate after all! I highly recommend you test it on some testaccount before using it with your normal emails.
Vis-à-vis Thunderbird rc1 already identifies itself as v1.0. Therefore Tag the Bird won't be updated once another release candidate or the final v1.0 is available (because it thinks you already got that version). If you install rc1 make sure to check this blog and/or addons.mozilla.org often for updates. If such are available, you have to manually uninstall rc1 and restart Thunderbird, before installing any other v1.0.

Known bugs:

Sometimes searches will return more results than you expected. The reason for this is, that when you command Thunderbird to search the 'X-Tags' header (or any other header) for a specific value, it will always search for that value in all headers. Therefore, for example, if you are searching for a tag called 'knallgrau', the search will return all messages tagged with 'knalkgrau' plus all messages that came from or went to somebody from that company, because the 'From' or the 'To' header (or even the 'Orgainzation' header) contain that string. This is a bug in Thunderbird, not Tag the Bird. I hope they fix it soon.
Sometimes searches will return no result altough they should. I could not find the reason for this yet, but I only encountered this behaviour right after Thunderbird started. My suspicion is, that the search engine somehow needs time to 'initialize'. Just do the same search again and it will return the right results. Help on this one is appreciated.
This is not really a bug: Tag the Bird uses a XPCOM method that has a comment about Mac OS here. I'd really appreciate if somebody could test Tag the Bird on one of the mentioned OSes.

If you find any other bugs, please help to make this a great extension and and report them here.

If you want to contribute by translating Tag the Bird from either English or German into your language please contact me.

Next steps after v1.0:

IMAP support
some minor enhancements in the UI

Ruby API for Tagthe.net

Benjamin Ferrari — 2006-05-31T09:18:00Z

Inspired by Pratik Naik's Ruby Wrapper, I decided to write an improved Ruby API for Tagthe.net. This is more or less a complete rewrite of Pratik's code, which has some improvements such as dynamic dimension detection or command line usage (see the comments in the script for more).

Tagthe.net Ruby API

Voulez vous mash-up avec nous?

Thomas Hammerl — 2006-05-30T20:07:00Z

French is a very beautiful language. Tagthe.net is a very beautiful webservice. So we thought those two would make an incredibly handsome couple. Congratulate them on their new relationship by entering a term below and get the tags to the corresponding article on http://fr.wikipedia.org in return.

and they lived happily ever after...

And it happens

smi — 2006-05-26T11:17:00Z

More and more people are doing cool stuff with tagthe.net, thanks for all the creativity. One of the recent efforts comes from Pratik Naik, he wrote a Ruby wrapper for the tagthe.net API. Great stuff, as you probably noticed we also added JSON support, so parsing the XML could also be replaced with using the JSON object, which is simpler in many cases.

Greg did enhance his TagOverlay with tagthe.net, also a nice one. Two or three more are still in development, we are really looking forward to pointing to them. It feels really nice to see all those things happen, thanks!

Get your JSON!

Thomas Hammerl — 2006-05-17T13:16:00Z

We've added JSON support to tagthe.net. Take a look at our API documentation for all the details.

Tag the Bird approved by Mozilla

Paul Alexandrow — 2006-05-11T07:16:00Z

Today Tag the Bird 0.9.1 finally got approved by Mozilla. You can now get it at addons.mozilla.org.

If you are already using Tag the Bird, please uninstall the extension and reinstall it with the file provided on addons.mozilla.org. Though this *should* not be nescessary, it makes sure that autoupdating your Thunderbird extensions now covers Tag the Bird too. You will always get the newest Tag the Bird version automatically.

Plus: Things look great as far as developing on v1.0 (truely searchable tags) goes. Stay tuned.

The youngest tagthe.net sprout: Tagview

Michael Sokolar — 2006-05-04T11:06:00Z

As tagthe.net flourishes yet another sprout is ready to blossom: Tagview.
The idea behind Tagview is to parse rss-feeds, send the content to tagthe.net and receive a bunch of tags for the passed text.
The first installation of Tagview parses knallgrau´s blogging service Twoday and displays different tag clouds for topics, persons and locations (therefore the address twoday.tagthe.net). In addition there are also clouds which display the tags from the last hour, the last 24 hours, the last week, and in future also the last month.
Since the tag quality of Tagthe.net has improved a lot during the last time, the tags are really matching the blog posts.

While Tagview only parses the twoday blogs, it is possible that in the future there are different Tagview installations, for example also for twoday.tuwien.ac.at, or any other Twoday blog.

I am currently working on a so called Trend Cloud feature for Tagview. This special cloud type displays the tags from, lets say the last week, in relation to the cloud of the week before the last week. Hence it will render quite interesting clouds, for example around easter the tag easter will be quite large, and so on.

Some more features are planned to come, so stay tuned and watch tagthe.net growing.

Tag the Bird 0.9.1

Paul Alexandrow — 2006-04-25T15:35:00Z

Here's a new Release of Tag the Bird:

Changelog:

Now compatibel with current Thunderbird version 1.5.0.2 (and all upcoming versions until - and not including - 1.5.1).
Message options are now in a separate cascaded menu.
Message options can be accessed via a message's contextmenu too (right click).
Message options can now be used in message windows (= windows only displaying a single message) and not in the main messenger window only.

Download: Tag the Bird v0.9.1
Edit: Please do not use this version anymore. See here.

I recommend you uninstall your 0.9.0 version of Tag the Bird, restart your Thunderbird, and install version 0.9.1 after that. It should not make any difference though.

Please note, that the same remarks as here still apply.

Because you're reading this, I guess you might be interested in the fact, that I'm currently in contact with some guys [1, 2] who have a couple of nice ideas about tags in Thunderbird and are willing to contribute. So stay tuned for great things to come!

Plus: I'm still trying to get TTB into the official extension list at addons.mozilla.org. At least I now found out what the problem is: Their upload form believes I want to submit an extension for the Mozilla Suite where TTB obviously will not work and the review fails. Guess I'll drop them a line.

We've bought ourselves a mansion

Thomas Hammerl — 2006-04-18T12:10:00Z

Because tagthe.net increased in popularity during the last months, the service is now running on it's own shiny new server. Why you should care about that, you might ask? Well, this means another significant improvement in performance and reliability. We think that's something to care about.