Fine Tuning
While talking to my son today and his mentioning how difficult it was to find a particular strip to show his roommate, I’ve decided to undertake something I should have done from the get-go, when I started using WordPress & ComicPress to display Willow’s Grove…over 1084 comics ago…using tags. This would have allowed my son to type in a tag or keyword and search for the comic he wanted to show off.
Now comes the fun part: Going through all 1084 published comics, plus the ones from the very early days, and create tags for them that best describe what is going on in each individual comic. The good news is I have all of the published strips in a folder on the hard drive so I can do it offline, create a spreadsheet to organize, etc., and then cut & paste the tags back in to each post. The bad news is, I have to do this for 1084 comics and try to make them unique to what is going on in the comic. I’m quite sure there’ll be overlaps and tags that fit multiple comics, but at least, once it is completed, readers can search by tags to find a strip they want to read again.
Serves me right for not doing this in the first place to have such a large backlog to tend to.
Stumble it!
Very nice Karl, look forward to it.
“cut & paste the tags back in to each post”
EEesssh, that sounds way more painful than it needs to be. Something like that is just crying out for some automation!
A quick Ruby script (with Mechanize to wrangle WordPress) could get that data uploaded lickety-split!
I’ve only dabbled in Ruby and that is when it first came out…wow, if read out of context, that sentence would sound really bad 😉
They don’t have to be unique. Overlapping tags are fine. The point of the tags is to group them into categories so I wouldn’t put too much effort into categorizing each one too distinctly. Being too distinct will just slow you down and give little added benefit to we the consumer. 🙂
I just want to make it easier to search through the large archive to find a particular strip, maybe not all of them since a majority of the strips are small story arcs, but there are some, like for example the ghost of Charlie Sheen’s career appearing, where I can narrow the tag down to describe that strip. But yeah, for most of them, it’ll be a description of the arc it’s a part of or a particular scene. Just something for easy searchability.
Excellent Idea!
I wish you the best of luck!
Thanks. Will keep you Grover’s posted on my progress.