And the run of Del.icio.us posts continues! Obviously, I’m fascinated by Del.icio.us. It’s subtilely and completely unintuitively powerful — a strange combination. Anyway, on to extisp.icio.us.

extispicious, a. [L. extispicium an inspection of the innards for divination; extra the entrails + specer to look at.] Relating to the inspection of entrails for prognostication.

Translated… extisp.icio.us allows you to create a 2D text “maps” of any Del.icio.us users’ tags weighted by frequency — more frequency equals large font size. Here’s a screen shot for my Del.icio.us Zoinger account (I trimmed it a bit so it would fit).

Click on image for “live” text map.

On “live” extisp.icio.us pages, the text is clickable. For example, WordPress in the image above leads here.

extisp.icio.us can also create a mosaic of images from Yahoo!’s Image Search based on a users’ tags, but I didn’t find it that useful. Check it out if you are interested.

I put a link in the Search area of the sidebar to the ZoingerPosts extisp.icio.us text map. It might be useful in navigating archived posts. I’ve also updated the Del.icio.us static page (which I am still working on… as I am all my static pages) to include extisp.icio.us.

I’ve been thinking that Del.icio.us is a bit too “free form” — that is, it’s completely flat with no real hierarchy or structure. Yes, you can do “and” searches, but that’s not really structure (this is an example of an “and” search). This has changed with the addition of a new “Experimental” feature called tag bundles.

It’s a bit hard to explain what tag bundles are, so I thought I’d run you through the creation of one.

Making sure that you are logged into del.icio.us, click on the Settings tab in the upper left hand corner (the Settings tab will not display if you are not logged in). Under the normal settings controls, you’ll find the Experimental features. Click on tagged bundles.

From here, click the create a new bundle.

This is where the action is. This page is where you actually create the bundle by entering in a name for the bundle on the left (right above submit a query), while on the right you enter the tags you would like to bundle together. After filling out both fields, click on submit a query.

Here’s an example of a completed bundle that I created for the ZoingerPosts Del.icio.us account (the Del.icio.us tagged post archive for this blog). I bundled all of my WordPress category tags together under the name Categories.

Going back to the main Del.icio.us page under Bookmarks reveals a new section in the “tags” area called Categories. Instant hierarchy and structure of sorts. Yippie!

Compare the above screenshot with this one which I made before creating the Categories tag bundle.

The Del.icio.us user Remy is a good one to check out for an example of someone making extensive use of this feature Update: 2005-04-26 — or check out Del.icio.us user ubi.quito.us.

I’ll be using this tagged bundles more in the future to organize things for the two Zoinger Del.icio.us accounts (i.e., Zoinger for interesting bookmarks and ZoingerPosts for archived posts).

If you are using Del.icio.us, then you should be using the Experimental Posting Tool bookmarklet you can find here. I wrote about it in an old post talking about how handy it is. Since using the bookmarklet more, I’ve really grown to like some of it’s features.

Once the bookmarklet is added to your browser’s bookmarks, clicking on it pops up an add-to-del.icio.us window allowing you to bookmark the current page. What’s great about this is that it also displays all of your tags, some recommended tags and some popular tags.

Here’s an screenshot of the pop-up window for a computer shopping page I del.icio.us.ed (let’s just make it a verb and get it over with).

Notice the popular tag comp.buys in the screenshot (this time there were no recommended tags). I guess that’s the “standard” tag for computer shopping pages. Neat.

The recommended tags and popular tags have helped me create my tagging schema. When I have questions on what the “right” tag to use is, I’ll refer to these two fields. I figure that using popular tags, when it makes sense, also helps users navigate my tags.

I love using Del.icio.us because it’s sometimes unintuitive — a lot of the time. It’s like Myst where you have to solve puzzles to learn how some of its features work — the Experimental section.

When you first install WordPress, the opening page it displays is called the Dashboard. Unfortunately, this page is pretty useless. In fact, it’s worse than useless, since it loads a bunch of RSS feeds from some seemingly random WordPress-power blogs (which can take quite a while). My original “fix” for this page was to never use it.

Fortunately, the folks over at the Simple Thoughts blog hacked a fix for the Dashboard. The fixed Dashboard is actually useful giving you a list of your draft posts, recent posts, number of post and comments and some other stuff.

You can read all about the Dashboard hack here. Once again, I’ve updated the WordPress Customization static page (also linked to in the sidebar) to include notes on this hack.