Simon Willison's Weblog: tagging

New tags

2025-07-19T02:02:54+00:00

A few months ago I added a tool to my blog for bulk-applying tags to old content. It works as an extension to my existing search interface, letting me run searches and then quickly apply a tag to relevant results.

Since adding this I've been much more aggressive in categorizing my older content, including adding new tags when I spot an interesting trend that warrants its own page.

Today I added system-prompts and applied it to 41 existing posts that talk about system prompts for LLM systems, including a bunch that directly quote system prompts that have been deliberately published or leaked.

Other tags I've added recently include press-quotes for times I've been quoted in the press, agent-definitions for my ongoing collection of different ways people define "agents" and paper-review for posts where I review an academic paper.

Tags: blogging, tagging, site-upgrades

Tags with descriptions

2024-06-18T16:50:07+00:00

Tags with descriptions

Tiny new feature on my blog: I can now add optional descriptions to my tag pages, for example on datasette and sqlite-utils and prompt-injection.

I built this feature on a live call this morning as an unplanned demonstration of GitHub's new Copilot Workspace feature, where you can run a prompt against a repository and have it plan, implement and file a pull request implementing a change to the code.

My prompt was:

Add a feature that lets me add a description to my tag pages, stored in the database table for tags and visible on the /tags/x/ page at the top

It wasn't as compelling a demo as I expected: Copilot Workspace currently has to stream an entire copy of each file it modifies, which can take a long time if your codebase includes several large files that need to be changed.

It did create a working implementation on its first try, though I had given it an extra tip not to forget the database migration. I ended up making a bunch of changes myself before I shipped it, listed in the pull request.

I've been using Copilot Workspace quite a bit recently as a code explanation tool - I'll prompt it to e.g. "add architecture documentation to the README" on a random repository not owned by me, then read its initial plan to see what it's figured out without going all the way through to the implementation and PR phases. Example in this tweet where I figured out the rough design of the Jina AI Reader API for this post.

Tags: blogging, github, projects, tagging, ai, generative-ai, llms, site-upgrades

WildlifeNearYou can now tag your Flickr photos for you

2010-02-04T17:01:09+00:00

WildlifeNearYou can now tag your Flickr photos for you

I’m really excited about this feature: if you opt-in, WildlifeNearYou will now write name and latin name tags to your Flickr photos after you’ve marked the species in the photo. This is even more interesting when you combine it with our suggest-a-species feature (the photo won’t get tagged until you’ve approved the suggestion). We also set the location on photos which don’t yet have one, but the real fun is the machine tags we’ve added, which allow developers to use the Flickr API to find photos by their WildlifeNearYou metadata (trip, species and place IDs). As a neat extra touch, the identifiers we use in the machine tags are the same as the ones used by our custom wlny.eu URL shortener, so it’s trivial to turn a machine tag in to the URL for that page on the main site.

Tags: flickr, machinetags, metadata, tagging, wildlifenearyou

Temporary Mapping: Solar Decathlon

2009-10-13T15:18:13+00:00

Temporary Mapping: Solar Decathlon

The OpenStreetMap default renderer supports start_date and end_date tags, meaning you can map temporary installations (in this case the 2009 Solar Decathlon on the DC National Mall) and have them automatically appear and disappear at the correct times.

Tags: andrew-turner, mapping, openstreetmap, solardecathlon, tagging

Guardian + Lucene = Similar Articles + Categorisation

2009-03-11T12:53:39+00:00

Guardian + Lucene = Similar Articles + Categorisation

Alf Eaton loaded 13,000 Guardian articles tagged Science in to Solr and Lucene and is using Solr’s MoreLikeThisHandler to find related articles and automatically apply Guardian tags to Nature News articles.

Tags: alf-eaton, full-text-search, guardian, lucene, naturenews, openplatform, search, solr, tagging

Quoting Les Orchard

2009-01-25T10:29:58+00:00

Tagging is like a salt water fish that lots of people thought was pretty and started trying to stick in fresh water tanks. I don’t think it thrives everywhere people have tried to stick it and not everyone who’s tried to clone tagging has gotten all the important parts right.

— Les Orchard

Tags: analogy, les-orchard, tagging

Film + Food & drink | guardian.co.uk

2008-08-23T11:18:12+00:00

Film + Food & drink | guardian.co.uk

The Guardian’s publishing system supports tag intersections based on the URL; this page shows all film stories that also mention food. There’s even an RSS feed.

Via Behold: the Guardianwhack

Tags: feeds, film, guardian, intersection, rss, tagging

The Zonetag API Goes Public

2007-06-02T00:53:01+00:00

The Zonetag API Goes Public

Awesome new API from YRB—given a cell tower ID can provide both a location and a list of suggested tags, based on data collected by ZoneTag.

Tags: api, cellid, location, tagging, yahoo, ydn, yrb, zonetag

Flickr Machine Tags

2007-01-24T19:54:52+00:00

Flickr Machine Tags

A new feature for API developers that lets them stuff arbritrary namespaced key/value pairs in to tags and query them using the API. Even without range queries, this will enable a ton of exciting new third party developments.

Tags: api, flickr, machinetags, tagging

Introducing: World Explorer and TagMaps

2007-01-19T09:55:08+00:00

Introducing: World Explorer and TagMaps

“Can we automatically extract information from Flickr geotagged images to create a rich visualization of the world we live in? The answer is: you bet.”

Tags: flickr, maps, tagging, yrb

del.icio.us: casting the net wider

2005-06-14T09:01:07+00:00

del.icio.us: casting the net wider

system: tags are a really neat way of adding specialised tag features.

Tags: delicious, tagging

Tags != folksonomies && Tags != Flat name spaces

2005-01-25T22:54:59+00:00

Tags != folksonomies && Tags != Flat name spaces

Clay Shirky’s latest thoughts on tags.

Tags: clay-shirky, tagging

Blogmarks on del.icio.us

2004-12-02T00:13:22+00:00

I'm horribly ill again: having defeated the mumps I now seem to have come down with some kind of 'flu thing. Lovely. In between whinging about my state of health and watching episodes of Frasier I've been playing with del.icio.us as part of my research in to web annotation. The connection between the two isn't particularly strong but it's clear that something very exciting is happening over there.

This evening I wrote a script to import my blogmarks in to del.icio.us. I don't plan to replace them with a feed from the site for a couple of reasons: firstly, I like to keep my data somewhere I control and secondly, del.icio.us doesn't support my "via" fields. I will however be adding tag support to my blogmarks and some kind of functionality to ensure that anything I post to them is added to del.icio.us as well.

The problem I have now is that I've added nearly 1200 untagged links to del.icio.us, and anyone who has played with the service for more than a few minutes knows that it's the tags that make it so much fun. Does anyone know of a good tool for bulk-tagging of items in del.icio.us? I've tried Cocoal.icio.us but unfortunately it only lets you assign tags to items one at a time; what I really want to do is run full text searches against my del.icio.us links and mass-apply tags to dozens of items at a time. If one doesn't exist I can always knock up a custom tool with the lovely API but I'd rather not duplicate the effort if I don't have to.

Tags: delicious, tagging

Jon Udell: del.icio.us

2004-08-12T17:03:31+00:00

Jon Udell: del.icio.us

Jon is doing some interesting things with the del.icio.us tagging system.

Tags: delicious, jon-udell, tagging

Blog Hot or Not

2002-07-25T23:45:23+00:00

Blog Hot or Not. I'm surprised no one had thought of this before - it's clever idea, well implemented. When adding my own blog I was asked to come up with some keywords to describe it, so here they are for posterity and my own future reference:

php, mysql, bath, web development, information architecture, css, html, xhtml, accessibility, programming, mozilla, python, xml, web services, content management

Tags: blogging, tagging