Pivot Hacking

2005-01-31 22:57 ☼ post

I spent some time today fiddling around with getting Pivot to automatically support Technorati tags via the built in keywords field that every Pivot entry already has. I ran into some problems early on because the way Pivot handles snippets changed slightly since the last time I experimented with them (each snippet has its own file that resides in a snippets subfolder now) . Once I figured that out I was able to make fairly quick progress despite my lack of php knowledge. I also discovered a similar Technorati snippet had already been whipped up on one of the Pivot forums, but in the end I went with my own custom snippet because it’s a little bit more flexible with optional label and seperator arguments. The end result is now visible at the bottom of all the entries that I’ve assigned keywords to.

Now that I have built in tags support, I think I’m probably less likely to use multiple categories to refer to entries as it ends up being redundant. I doubt I will go back and change too many past entries either, but at least it’s relatively painless if I should choose to. The really nice thing about keyword/tag support is that I can instantly add new tags when I think of them; categories require an additional step to create and at a certain point start to get unwieldy to deal with.