Maintenance

I’ve done some site maintenance over the last few days, the biggest single upgrade being that of the gallery. This shouldn’t affect you as a user too much (except for the use of tags, more on that later) but it increases security and flexibility. I’m now also using a spam filter to counter commentspam, as this was getting out of hand. And last but not least, I’m working on bilingual support so all posts will be available in Dutch as well as English, but this isn’t ready yet.

Now, about the tags. These will allow you to browse through my photo’s in an entirely different way. Tags are like keywords or labels that apply to individual images in the gallery. You’ll see these listed along with the photo’s if you visit the gallery now. Clicking on any of these tags will show you all images with that tag from the entire gallery. For instance, you’re browsing through “Rome, Summer 2006″ and you see a photo of the Colosseum. This will have, you guessed it, “Colosseum” written below it. Clicking on “Colosseum” will then show you all photo’s of the Colosseum, from “Rome, Summer 2006″, as well as from “Rome, Autum 2006″, etc. How nifty. That’s not all though. There’s a new link in the navigation bar that says “Tag Cloud”. The tag cloud is a collection all (or the most popular, if there are too many) tags. The bigger a tag is printed in the tag cloud, the more images it has. Again, clicking on a tag will show you all images with that tag.

I’ve decided not to assign every imaginable tag to my photo’s. That means that if there’s a photo of a tree, it will not be tagged ‘Tree’. It will simply remain untagged. This is because there would be so many photo’s that could have the tag ‘Tree’, that more relevant tags (like ‘Colosseum’) would be snowed under and the Tag Cloud would become useless. As for different names in different languages, I’ve chosen the way mapmakers have used for decades, if not centuries. Things are tagged with their original name (St. Peter will be tagged with ‘San Pietro’) unless the English name is significantly different from the original name (Not everyone will know or understand that the Italian’s call Florence Firenze, so it will be tagged ‘Florence’).