The main TagUtil User Interface is as shown below:
The interface consists of 3 sections, namely, the Tags Selector, the Bookmarks and the Pings.
Tag Selector: Tags are selected from the ‘Master List’ or are manually added, if not available in Master List. TagUtil maintains a user’s ‘My List’, so that custom tags can be saved and reused, instead of typing them each time. Selected tags appear in the shortlist, and will be used to construct the html code, when the ‘Generate code’ button is pressed.The Master List contents can be configured using ‘Manage Master List’ menu button which opens up a separate screen for this purpose.
Bookmarks: If the user chooses to add Live Bookmarks by checking this option, the shortlisted tags from the Tags Selector appear in the list box in this section. One or more tags can be selected from this list. TheTechnorati feeds for the selected tags would be added as Live Bookmarks, when the user presses the finishing button (labelled ‘Generate code’).
Pings: User can choose to ping Technorati using TagUtil. In that case, user can configure a time interval after which the ping would be issued. The user has to paste the Tag Sequence code into the post and publish the blog within this interval. Based on comfort level, user can increase or decrease this interval, though the default value is 2 minutes. User needs to specify his/her blog URL, which would be used in the ping message. If the user maintains multiple blogs, all those URLs can be stored in the blog list, and user can select the URL to be used in the ping. A separate screen is provided to manage the blog list (to perform operations such as add URL, delete URL, clear list etc.). The main screen also offers the facility to add URLs, to make it easy for the user.
The ‘Manage Master List’ screen, which was mentioned earlier, is as shown below:
Available Tag Sources are displayed as a list, from which they can be checked and included. Tags from sources that have been included as above, constitute the Master List of the main TagUtil screen, from which selections for the Tag Sequence are made.
Tag Sources specific to various languages, regions, communities, and fields of interest can be created and shared among fellow webloggers, as RDF files (a document file format). ‘Add New Tag Source’ enables a user to add a new Tag Source (received from another user) to the ‘Available Tag Sources’ list. With this, a whole new set of tags become available to the TagUtil user. The user just needs to specify the file URL of the hard disk location where he/she has stored the new Tag Source, after receiving / downloading it.
‘Create New Tag Source’ is a facility for entering a list of tags and obtaining a Tag Source as an RDF file. For example, you may want to compile a list of most needed tags / popular categories, for your blogging community / language / interest group. Go ahead and create the Tag Source, and share it with other members of the group (either by hosting it for downloads or by emailing to fellow webloggers). Those members would then have to perform ‘Add New Tag Source’ to include your source in their TagUtil installation.
TagUtil comes packaged with two Tag Sources – one for English language (compiled from Technorati popular tags) and another for Tamil language (compiled from personal blogging experience). A third ‘My List’ source is a repository of tags specific to a user. It starts as an empty list and gets populated as the user adds entries to it. These three sources cannot be removed, but they may be unchecked and excluded from contributing to the Master List. There are another seven empty slots for adding further Tag Sources. These sources can be removed using the ‘Remove Selected’ button.
(Note: File ‘write’ operations such as ‘Add to My List’ and ‘Create Tag Source’ have been programmed to automatically create data files in the ‘c:\’ folder of the windows filesystem. So, these operations would not work on non-windows platforms. To that extent, TagUtil is platform dependent.)
