A particular blog entry usually feels relevant and topical when fresh, at least to the author. So let’s say a blog entry even carries some non-zero long-term value. How do you find it after a while? And more importantly, how will your readers find your blog entry?

Descriptive subjects go a long way. But your readers may be searching for “development model” when your header says “release plan”. And even if you anticipate the search words used by your readers, you can only pick one wording for your header.

Full-text search also helps. There’s now a brand new Search field in the top left corner of Planet MySQL. Chances are you’ll find what you look for, no matter if search for “Chinese”, “DRBD”, “development” or “PHP”. You may even search for several words, such as “Chinese, UTF”.

Easy searchability calls for yet a bit more, namely tagging. Tags are a great way for the author (or for the reader!) to underline key aspects of a blog post (or Flickr picture or Slideshare presentation or any item you post on the Web, of course).

And next to searching, tagging is the second area where PlanetMySQL has lately been improved, by Dups, as announced in his blog entry last week.

Four key points:

1. Tags are displayed under the blog header. We import the tags originally written by the blogger.
2. When you click on the tags, you’ll find blog posts with that tag across individual blogs. Example: http://planet.mysql.com/?tag_search=169 has all PHP tagged posts, on any blog aggregated to Planet MySQL.
3. You can also search for (multiple) tags in the search field. Example: “Tag: PHP, development”.
4. The community may edit tags (when logged in to MySQL.com). The wisdom of individual community members can thus be shared by others.

For more, go read Dups’s blog!

P.S. UPDATE: I got a question on what the numbers in the picture are. They’re “numeric tags” in the Firefox browser, as appearing with the “Mouseless Browsing” add-on. They enable me to “click” on links from the keyboard without moving my hand to the mouse.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 8:13 and is filed under MySQL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.