Updates

Lots of background changes in the tagging engine. More to do, always, but there's some real extra power there.

In the foreground, there has been a lot of cleanup on the caching of widgets, and a big step forward on the Wordpress.com image widget, which now has a page of its own. Please kick the tyres (hard!) at http://linkky.com/wp. Here's one we rolled earlier:

Hey Bugsy...

You can never, ever, do enough debugging.

During the course of some improvements to allow direct text input to the widget page (to replace the now defunct Xtractor page), we noticed that not all of the tags that were supposed to be arriving actually did! 1 in 15 to be precise.

One of those stupid things, but it's fixed now, so you'll see slight improvements over the next couple of hours as the cache clears.

Flash me your Tweets...

Oooh, er.

Actually quite prosaic, really. You can now get a quick flash visualisation of any Twitter feed by going to http://tweet.linkky.com/yourtwitterid

Flash! A-ah....

Yup, we're at the fairly happy stage finally with the Flash widget. Yet more messing around in the back-end to refine the tagger even more. There is work, always more work to refine it, but the results are becoming ever more useful.

Fiddle to your heart's content at http://linkky.com/build_your_widget.html

In cyberspace, no-one can hear you scream...

Thankfully. After every form of testing you can think of, for no real reason, our database decided to crash. Perfectly repairable, but a pain nonetheless. Sorry if you were widgetless for a bit.

Version 2 launched

Please God it works!

You'll see the new version on the left hand side.

Some major changes:

1. No more auto-scrolling list. We never liked it, but it required a major soak in the shower to sort it out.

2. A tag cloud by default. People love tag clouds. They are visual and accessible. We put a lot of work into getting the colors to be complementary to the base text color.

3. Better tagging algorithm. Again, a lot of work went into this, with the introduction of "SuperTags", which you will see are in parentheses. These are non-literal, ie they are an attempt to work out what the page is about, not just taking interesting phrases

4. Better scoring and refinement. Try limiting the number of tags on a page, and you'll hopefully still get what is useful

5. Pick a URL or Twitter feed. Now you can choose any URL or Twitter feed, and have those tags display on your page

6. List view on a tab. This is how we sorted the auto-scroller, by hiding it behind the cloud (and not letting it scroll automatically)

7. Related categories. If you click on a tag and it has any Wikipedia categories associated with it, there is an option to make them appear.

8. IE8 Accelerator. Not strictly part of the widget, but check it out at http://linkky.com. If you use IE8, you can get a little tag cloud of the page you're viewing, just using a right-click.

To Do:

1. Code cleaning. It's all a bit slower than it should be, mainly due to some redundant code

2. Taggregation. Don't you wish you could mash up a few pages/feeds, and see what they all have in common - Coming soon!

3. Image only tag cloud. For those of you who use Wordpress.com and can't add widgets. We hope to have an image URL you can use to have a nice picture of what a tag cloud would look like on your page...

Linkky goes all Google Gadgety

With a bit of tweaking, we found out how you get your widget into IGoogle and other such places:

1. Get the widget.

2. Copy the "Embed" code

3. Paste it into Notepad or a similar text editor. It will look a bit like this in the middle:

WIDGETBOX.renderWidget('b14saa0c-ab64-4c9b-be28-a604bcf8e42e')

4. Copy the long ID (eg b14saa0c-ab64-4c9b-be28-a604bcf8e42e)

5. Insert it at the end of this this URL in place of b14saa0c-ab64-4c9b-be28-a604bcf8e42e

http://widgetserver.com/syndication/GetWidget/googlegadget/b14saa0c-ab64-4c9b-be28-a604bcf8e42e

6. Paste the new URL anywhere you can insert a Google gadget (eg iGoogle or GMail using the new Labs feature)

Twitter U like

Yes, you can now enter a Twitter ID into the widget, and get tags generated from that Twitter feed. Just edit the widget, and look at the bottom of the settings page.

What's in beta

You may have noticed a separate widget on the bottom left of the screen, which changes periodically. And sometimes doesn't show up at all!

We're experimenting with two new features at the moment.

First is the continuous scrolling widget. Before, you had to wait for the whole list to go past, before you could see the rest of the list, which is a bit of a pain, frankly. The continuous scrolling part we seem to have cracked, in part. The problem is getting the expanding boxes right.

The second element is to cut out the AJAX call. Because of latency issues, the existing widget scans the page, and throws up an initial list of topics. It then goes off to wikipedia, and looks to see if there are any matches, and then throws the results back. Technically interesting, but ultimately, not ideal. Fortunately, wikipedia has vast dump files that you can play around with. So over the weekend, we stripped out all the information we (think we) need, so that it will be a one step process of putting the widget out. It just sounds so easy. Right

Finally, there is the bizarre label thing in the posts, which currently say "Beatles1". This is an experiment is matching labels to posts using Feedburner. In time, we'll be able to do it. The biggest issues is that they are produced using Javascript, and so aren't picked up by Technorati. Yet.