The feed may look like this one:

Since I liked this post, I can click on Vote UP, and the link opens in my …

A particular blog entry usually feels relevant and topical when fresh, at least to the author. So let’s say a blog entry even carries some non-zero long-term value. How do you find it after a while? And more importantly, how will your readers find your blog entry?

Descriptive subjects go a long way. But your readers may be searching for “development model” when your header says “release plan”. And even if you anticipate the search words used by your readers, you can only pick one wording for your header.

Full-text search also helps. There’s now a brand new Search field in the top left corner of Planet MySQL. Chances are you’ll find what you look for, no matter if search for “Chinese”, “DRBD”, “development” or “PHP”. You may even search for several words, such as “Chinese, UTF”.

Easy searchability calls for yet a bit more, namely tagging. …

Since MySQL Proxy 0.7.0 is soon to be released, I thought another brief tutorial would be helpful. Today we ran across a good use case, and so I wanted to pass this along. If you’ve not used Proxy yet, this is a great opportunity to get your feet wet with it and some Lua.

When queries are routed though MySQL Proxy from various servers, the MySQL Server only sees that the query came from the machine Proxy is running on.

So when you are viewing output of SHOW PROCESSLIST, you have no way of telling what server a particular query originated from.

However, this could be very useful information to have, especially to determine which server a particular long-running query is coming from at that particular moment in time.

mysql> show processlist;
+----+------+-----------------+------+---------+------+-------+------------------+
| Id | User | Host            | db …

The Term Tagging

The popular feature of 'tagging' content is nothing new. The average netizen should have encountered it by now. Tagging was made popular by sites like del.icio.us and flickr, where users can attach free-form strings, so-called 'tags' to their bookmarks and images. The viewer can then use these tags to navigate through one or more user's contents and locate related content.

Scientific Background

The most-cited work on tagging is this research paper from HP, which starts categorizing tagging as 'folksonomy' (folk taxonomy) in contrast to the conventional term taxonomy. A taxonomy is usually a categorization of content according to a hierarchical and exclusive tree of attributes, while the folksonomy is …

Of all the features that I've added to my homebrew blogging software tagging (or folksonomys) has been my favorite. Here's why:

Tag Clouds

I've designed the home page of my blog to make it easy for a first time visitor to know what my blog is about. Nothing does this better than the tag cloud of popular tags they are presented with:

With a quick glance you can see that this blog is mostly about ColdFusion/CFML, but I also talk about MySQL, Java, RSS, …