Better Tag Browsing
Posted: July 9, 2008 Filed under: firefox, mozilla | Tags: extensions, firefox, firefox extensions, folksonomy, mozilla, tagging, tags 12 CommentsTag Finder is a Firefox extension that lets you browse your tags in a manner similar to the column view in the Mac OS X Finder. It allows you to view related tags, and to traverse tag relations quickly.
You can enable the view by clicking the tag icon on the toolbar of the bookmarks Library in Firefox 3. Installation does require logging into AMO, as the extension is still experimental.
dietrich.ayala 
I’d love to have a big tag database and use it like this or even only in the location bar. Unfortunately tagging takes time that I didn’t want to spend thus far. Maybe social tagging hooked up with Places would solve this.
Dao, for tagging became a whole lot easier using Dietrichs tweez extension – tag autocomplete is a tremendous improvement.
I now usually file bookmarks using Ctrl-D to enter a custom title, but assign tags in a second step through tweez using Shift-T.
tagsifter: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/998
[…] X Finder. “It allows you to view related tags, and to traverse tag relations quickly.” Dietrich’s blog post has more details and a Install link for the add-on […]
As already mentionned in comments at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8056 , there are unfortunately obvious bugs when selecting tags: some “sub-tags” are not listed, and one tag can appear again in a column despite being already selected. Else, I really like the idea, keep the good work !
rix, can you elaborate? thomas’ comment on there makes no sense: i had not actually tagged that URL with both “food” and “banana”, so there was not actually an error… other than a human one 🙂
This was a feature of the old Bookmark Tags for 1.5 but was originally removed to be replaced by clouds for 2.0. An option for lists instead of clouds got added at my request, and it’s good for something constrained to the sidebar, but I still missed the multicolumn finder approach. So I’m excited by this extension.
However, the bugs are there. For the example image, observe that the ‘cake’ tag is selected in the second column, but still appears in the fourth column. Having been selected once, it should never appear again.
Similarly, if there are no URLs that are tagged with both food and banana, then once you’ve selected food in the first column, banana should never show up in a subsequent column.
On the other hand, I have (for example) the JSLint page tagged with JavaScript, Development, and Dojo. If I click any one of those tags in the finder, the JSLint page shows up in the list – but none of those tags ever show up in the second column of tags.
(Oh, and a quick aside: This entry is only filed under Mozilla. I first looked for it under Firefox and couldn’t find it. Lucky for me, it’s still on the front page. It should be filed under both.
Tags are the way to go. Fx should get rid of the old bookmark folders and just use tags. Currently there are two incompatible paradigms for classifying bookmarks, it doesn’t make sense. I like the way Gmail does it, a folder hierarchy doubling as tags.
Currently I’m using tags and no folders for new bookmarks (plus very few functional folders, e.g. bookmarks toolbar), but as I have a lot of old bookmarks in folders without tags I wanted to use Tweez to migrate them.
I just tried to install Tweez from AMO, but I’m constantly getting CRC errors. Is there a mirror?
pixi, they are not incompatible. They are just two different views onto the same data.
I am working on a Mac with OpenMeta installed. That means, that I take a lot of care to tag my files with personal tags. This way I can combine information from different folders into topics without binding these informaitonal entities to a single topic, as it would be in a hierarchy. Having a tag-only based system means incompatibility with most other areas of computing. I am not always at home, at my machine with the tagging system set up. Sometimes I am using my data via a SSH connection in a terminal. Folders are good! And what, if I want to navigate my bookmarks with a text-editor? And so on, and so on…
Here the I have folders like this:
eBooks/Arts/Literature/Austen, Jane
eBooks/Arts/Literature/Hemingway, Ernest
Whenever I do a work, which includes text by Ernest Hemingway I use tags. But imagine a folder of thousand ebooks of all topics all thrown into one directory. We never will lose TOPics. And this is why we need hierarchy. Actually, we need both. I am all for tagging. But not with the loss of hierarchy.
Dietrich, would you mind giving this an update to FF3.6+? Of course, only if those two most precious human beings we see on the photos do not require your time anymore.
Thanks.
Oh, and I am missing Tweez, too.