First, I wrote a PHP class for passing content to Open Calais and getting back tags. Then, a WordPress plugin for tagging posts as you write them. Now, taking it one step further again, here's a plugin for automatic tagging of your post archives.

I tried tagging for a while last year, but wasn't consistent in my choice of tags or in tagging every post at all. That made the whole system not worth the work, so I removed the plugins I used to add tags in the first place. Now tags are as much a part of WordPress as categories, and I have almost 170 posts not tagged at all. I could edit every one and add them, manually or with the plugin, but that would take a lot of time. Instead, I wrote a plugin which goes through my entire archive of posts, sends the post title and content over to Calais and adds any tags it finds. If there were already tags on the post, only new ones found would be added. Continued »

I just completed the WP Calais Auto Tagger plugin, the obvious first use of my Open Calais Tags class. It adds a tag suggestion box to your WordPress post writing screen which suggests tags based on your post content using the Open Calais API. The suggestions can be added to the post's tag list with a single click, or manually added if you don't want to use them all.

If you've been meaning to use WordPress's new built-in tags, but are too lazy to come up with a good list every time you blog, give the plugin a try. Comments, suggestions and bug reports are appreciated.

Calais is a free web service from Clearforest, a Reuters company, that can perform semantic analysis on any English text. It uses natural language processing to extract concepts and relationships from the text. It's been around for a few months, but there's been very little developer activity around it, and even fewer completed applications using the technology.

Not finding any other work to build on, I wrote my own PHP class for extracting tags from content with Open Calais' API. You can get the source and read more here. This class takes a block of text or HTML, sends it to Open Calais or parsing, and extracts all of the entities (things like peoples' names, companies, technologies, etc.). It returns a multidimensional array organized by entity type.

There's more Open Calais can do, but I hope this class contributes something to those PHP developers that'd like to start using it but had no place to start with the lightweight documentation and eerily quiet official forums. I plan on putting this class to work as an auto-tagging plugin for WordPress posts. I still need some time to figure out how to integrate that into the new authoring interface of WP 2.5, which this blog is now running on.

Inspired by this article at Read/Write Web, I decided to make a search engine out of one of my bookmark collections. Discover Semantic searches about 70 sites dealing with the semantic web (aka "web 3.0"). It covers W3 recommendations, specifications, tools, tutorials, and dozens of blogs about semweb.

If nothing else, it was interesting to see what can be done with the CSEs. I also used Microsoft Expression Web 2 Beta for the coding. Unlike the first version of Expression Web, this one's got PHP intellisense (language library and code completion) and the built-in web server can run PHP. It's a lot faster than Eclipse, which really doesn't like the size of my Symfony projects these days.

A new report I'm considering adding to W3Counter is a "Live Map" — a Google map that shows visitors arriving to your website in real-time. It updates every 3 seconds with an AJAX call, instantly recenting the map on each new visitor and popping up their information. I've had fun staring at it for half an hour now. I've also got a new website design in the works, as I seem unable to let go of it to an outside designer...

I need a new website for W3Counter, and I can't design it. I need to reorganize the site and there are going to be lots of new service plans and features to show off.

I'm thinking of holding a contest at SitePoint, but I don't know if I'll get good results from this. I'm not 100% sure what content should be on the homepage yet, and designers entering a contest they may not win won't take a lot of time to think through the functional/marketing aspects of the design for me if I can't pin it down in the brief. Even though I'd offer at least $700-1000, which would bring in some of the better designers in the contest area, I'm still unsure if this will result in locking me into buying a design I don't really want.

On the other hand, hiring a designer/agency with a decent portfolio is probably going to run at least 3 times that much to start. W3Counter doesn't turn much of a profit right now, so that's a lot of my own money to invest in the design.

What do you think? Contest or designer? Any recommended designers you've worked with?

With room to grow once again, I've been working on the other features I planned for W3Counter back in the fall. The main task, which I hope will allow me to sell to bigger customers than my normal $5/month individual webmaster, is providing private instances of the entire service. The plan is to have three distinct products in the next six months — the hosted, individual service; a white-label private instance for designers, service providers, and networks of many websites; and a white-label version of the entire service for resale. Continued »

Like every year since spinning off W3Counter from Website Goodies in 2004, it's exceeded its hardware capacity once again in December. Initially the service shared a Celeron 2.4/512MB server with all of my websites. It then grew into its own Pentium 4 3.0GHz/1GB server, then into a 2-processor 4-core Opteron/4GB setup. This time it's outgrown the hard drive IO capacity of a single server, evidenced by maxing the IO wait stat on `top` and the daily afternoon site slow downs. Continued »

I sniffed around the Flash enough to realize where it's grabbing its data and can now parse that directly for info like the last songs I've listened to or those I've marked as favorites. I wrapped that up into another WordPress plugin that includes the Zune Card widget from the last. So, this single Zune Social WordPress Plugin adds three widgets and theme functions to a blog it's installed on.