Warming up to context.
Context can be described as, “the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.” Context plays an important role in communication and I’d like start by providing better context to posts.
You may have noticed a left column on my blog post pages. It now contains geo location information regarding where the post was written, categories it belongs to, links that exist within the post and photos that were taken on the day the it was published.
What does all this mean?
The goal is to give posts an added level of meaning. In some instances I’ve noticed a correlation between photos and what I decided to write or maybe a location inspired a post. Sometimes it may not be as apparent but, if anything, it brings a little more life to information.
I’m planning on adding photos that correlate to the location pages once I have time to play with the new geo data in Flickr. I’d love to see other examples of this practice. Suggestions are always welcome.
Remarks
Jeff Croft http://www.jeffcroft.com/
Great minds think alike. A lot of what I’ve been working on for a revision of my personal site is related to this same kind of thing. You beat me to it, and it looks awesome. Good work, man.
Arthur Case
Great update to your site Nathan. Love your work :)
I read a post on Clagnut a little while ago along the same lines.
[Tagging blogs - a Reboot of sorts][1]
[1]:http://clagnut.com/blog/1711/ “Tagging blogs - a Reboot of sorts”
Nathan Borror http://www.playgroundblues.com/
@Arthur - That was a great post by Clagnut and a very interesting approach. Not sure how I feel about ‘tag=value’ convention but it sure is flexible.
So far I’ve been happy with breaking out certain contextual elements into their own models, i.e. Locations. It allows me to keep them in their own sandbox and latch them on to any object in the system.
I’m actually a recovering tag-a-holic which is why there’s an absence here. I love tags but after reading Peter Morville’s [Ambient Findability][1] it got me pondering the role tags play on non-social sites. I’m planning a response to sandro’s [comment][2] with the hopes of clarifying this for myself.
[1]:http://www.amazon.com/Ambient-Findability-Peter-Morville/dp/0596007655/ “Ambient Findability” [2]:http://www.domaki.com/posts/2006/jun/26/80x80/#c38 “Comment by Sandro”
Arthur Case
I agree with you regarding tags. I’ve only just used them in the last few months for my delicious account, and I find the lack of structure creates somewhat of a mess. Say you have a link to a page which is a tutorial on Apple’s Aperture, the amount of possible tags is huge (apple, mac, os x, aperture, photography, tutorial etc.). I think a more structured approach using a limited number of categories is easier to comprehend and easier to manage, at least for something like a personal website.
Using separate models/apps that contain data that can be attached to other objects is the way I’ve been approaching building my website. Thankfully I’m using Django like you and the separation is really easy to implement.
Nathan Borror http://www.playgroundblues.com/
@Arthur - It’s great to hear you’re using Django. Be sure to send me an email when you’ve finished your site.
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