tRuTag - The taggregator By: Jamal Hansen License: Ruby license Email: jh[at]rubyyot.com url: http://trutag.rubyforge.org What do I need? tRuTag is written in Ruby, so you will need to be able to run Ruby scripts. If you are not able to run Ruby scripts or would like to know more about this scripting language you can find the information here: http://www.ruby-lang.org. Otherwise you will need a computer with an Internet connection and a user account with at least one of the supported sites. tRuTag has full support for del.icio.us, 43Things.com and other popular tag based sites. How to I run it? Well, once you have Ruby, to install tRuTag simply go to your commandline and type: gem install tRuTag to run the basic script run: makecloud.rb What is it? tRuTag was something I wrote because I was interested in tags and meta data, but was frustrated because tags end up clustered in a single site. It is difficult to break out of that site and look at the whole internet. I think that the whole purpose of tagging things is to be able to group them not by site, but by idea. What sites are supported? Well there are two types of support offered by tRuTag. The first is Input/Output, which means that if you supply the necessary information tRuTag will retrieve your tags and let you look up tags on the site. These sites as of v0.3 are: Site Input Required ====================================================================== 43things.com username 43places.com username del.icio.us username, password Jots.com username, password Yahoo! My Web 2.0 username Dinnerbuzz.com username Tagzania.com username Unalog username Flickr username Also supported are the internationalized versions of 43Things which are Site Input Required ====================================================================== Cosas43.com username Cose43.com username Choses43.com username Dinge43.com username Coisas43.com username The second type of support is on the output page. If you have an entry in your config file for a site without user information it will include the site in the options for the tag cloud output. These sites as of v0.3 include all of the input sites and: Site ====================================================================== AllConsuming.net Technorati Photobucket Google Simpy Blinklist.com Furl (you will need to log in manually) GutenTag (creative-mobs.com) Hatena (b.hatena.ne.jp) Del.irio.us Webshots (s.phpspot.org) Livemark.jp Podcast.net Upcoming.org Colr.org TagCentral Consumating Blogmarks Wists SmugMug Foundcity Swik What does it do? tRuTag will aggregate the tags from your accounts on various websites. tRuTag will then generate a webpage (I use it as my homepage) that contains a tag cloud of all your tags from all your sites. You can then choose your target site (the input sites and others including Technocrati.com and Google are available) and click on the desired tag and be taken to the tag page for the site you selected. How do I config? As of this version a config script is run if one does not already exist. You will see it the first time you run makecloud.rb. It will be created in your home directory as .tRuTag. As I run a Linux system, I'm not sure exactly where that will be under windows. If you would like to run config again simply run makecloud with the -c option Passwords Passwords are a sensitive issue and one that I did not want to take lightly. If you decide to use a website that needs a password (del.icio.us, Jots) you have options available to you. 1) Save them to your config file. You will be prompted for this option in the config script. 2) Omit them from your config file and be prompted for them when you run makecloud.rb 3) Omit them from your config file and pass them in as command line arguments. If you enter them manually a couple times, you will know the order they are in simply pas them in as arguments to makecloud.rb. 4) If you are using tRuTag in your own application you can pass in the passwords directly. See makecloudfromarray for an example. Options There are 2 command line options available for makecloud.rb. If you use an argument that is not preceeded with a '-' it will assume that you are passing it passwords to your sites. -o is offline mode and it will look for XML tag files on another location. This is really for advanced use only -c will run the config script before generating the file. Acknowledgements To my wife and kids for letting me spend hours at a time on the PC. To everyone downloading this script and writing about it in your blogs. To Pat Eyler for r43 and listening to stupid questions. To Scott Raymond for flickr. I hope this explains the script. If you have questions or problems please feel free to email me: jh[at]rubyyot.com