Tagnacious

Album Cover: Flight of the Conchords

"She's so hot, she's making me sexist."
Flight of the Conchords / Boom

Posted on July 13, 2008 11:44 PM in Web Development

I started working on Tagnacious back in May after a discussion with a friend and coworker about how it would be cool to be able to search a bunch of sites based on a single tag, as opposed to searching a single site based on a single tag. It was about as informal a conversation as two people could have, but once I heard the idea come out of my mouth a lightbulb went on and I thought, "hey, that's something I could build myself."

Before I got too carried away, though, I made sure to look around and see if there was anything like what I was imagining already available out on the web. I found two sites: TagsAhoy and Keotag. The problem with the former, at least in terms of my idea, is that it is focused entirely around your tags, and not the tags applied by anyone. The problem with the latter is that, while it's closer to my idea, the site makes you choose a tag first and then choose the place you want to search for that tag as a second, separate step. Keotag does offer information from more services, so I guess it has that going for it.

Since I wasn't able to find a site that worked how I imagined one would, I went ahead and implemented Tagnacious. I hooked it up to the APIs and feeds from Flickr, YouTube, Last.fm, Amazon.com, del.icio.us and WordPress in order to provide tag-based search results in the form of photos, videos, music, books, bookmarks and blog posts, respectively.

The end result looks a little something like this:

Screenshot of the Website Tagnacious

If you've got some time to kill, please give it a whirl. As of right now, I know of one or two bugs (e.g. sometimes calls to the YouTube API fail and the rendering of the rest of the page just halts) and I've got a few additional features up my sleeve, but I think it's due time I let the rest of you play around with it and let me know what you think.

Comments

Alan on July 17, 2008 at 2:49 PM:

Bernie, cool site man, oooooozes 2.0 juice ;-).

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