Taxonomy, tagging, and topics oh my
2024-10-20
This weekend I decided that I wanted an easier way to look up things I had written by the topics I’m writing about. I’m a fan of normalized data so I started by creating a couple tables. One for the tags aka topics that I’ve written about, and one for a link between my posts and the topics. I was day-dreaming the user interface for these topics and had started muddling through creating some endpoints when it occurred to me that I already had topics that I had applied to the posts in the way of a string of topics used for SEO (search engine optimization). With this end mind I decided to write a script whose job would be to loop through all of my blog posts and process the tags/topics one by one. This script would create the tag/topic if it didn’t exist and then create the link between the posts and the tags. After debugging that process it occurred to me that a similar process could be used so that the user interface for maintaining the tabs could be the existing blog post form, as is, without any changes. This could be accomplished by taking the existing seo data, spiting it by commas and then processing the topics/tags one at a time. All that was left was code to clean up anything that was removed when editing posts.
This weekend I decided that I wanted an easier way to look up things I had written by the topics I’m writing about. I’m a fan of normalized data so I started by creating a couple tables. One for the tags aka topics that I’ve written about, and one for a link between my posts and the topics. I was day-dreaming the user interface for these topics and had started muddling through creating some endpoints when it occurred to me that I already had topics that I had applied to the posts in the way of a string of topics used for SEO (search engine optimization). With this end mind I decided to write a script whose job would be to loop through all of my blog posts and process the tags/topics one by one. This script would create the tag/topic if it didn’t exist and then create the link between the posts and the tags. After debugging that process it occurred to me that a similar process could be used so that the user interface for maintaining the tabs could be the existing blog post form, as is, without any changes. This could be accomplished by taking the existing seo data, spiting it by commas and then processing the topics/tags one at a time. All that was left was code to clean up anything that was removed when editing posts.