Mark Embling

Yesterday I decided to join Rob Conery in disconnecting my hand from my mouse for 'International Mouse Freedom Day'. What's more, this was a full real-life day at work rather than just a little experiment at home. The idea was that ditching the mouse and embracing the keyboard would speed everything up, make me more efficient and probably save the world.

Recently I've been working on a couple of sites on-and-off in my spare time which both have a couple of things in common: they both use MongoDB as a data store and both incorporate the concept of tagging. Using MongoDB's map-reduce functionality is ideal for getting the list of tags, but it does come with its own set of potential issues which are well worth bearing in mind.

Last weekend I attended the latest in the series of DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper events at Microsoft's Reading campus. This one was entitled Modern .NET Day and focused on what we have available to us right now as .NET developers, rather than things we might have in the future.

Whilst browsing the web, I came across an article on URL Canonicalisation by Matt Cutts which talks about the fact you should standardise on one "main" domain name for your site and ensure any others redirects to it using a 301 permanent redirect.

Recently I was looking into making HTML 5 a little smaller. I found that not only can you make all the usual tweaks to save space such as removing any instances of div overload and keeping class names and IDs small, you can actually remove entire chunks of HTML which isn't technically required.

The use of tagging on websites seems to be something which has gradually become mainstream in recent years, particularly since the advent of 'web 2.0', where it became very widely used. I thought I'd explore this phenomenon, as well as discussing the implications, advantages and disadvantages of tagging and tag clouds and exploring how various different sites have approached it.