Those who read this blog via an aggregator are probably not aware that we’ve just pushed out a refreshed front page for the blogs.educationau.edu.au site:
You’ll note that this now exposes blog post categories in the now-traditional tag-cloud interface, backed by a sophisticated search built using the open source Solr search engine. This implementation allows search refinenment by tag browsing.
For example, http://blogs.educationau.edu.au/?&category=eduausem2007 shows all posts tagged edausem2007. Then we can refine the result set using the ‘danah boyd’ tag to see results which are tagged with both eduausem2007 AND ‘danah boyd’.
Anyway, I’m pretty impressed with the job that Vaughan and Bojana have done with the site.
2 Comments
Thanks for the rap Nick!
In addition to myself and Bojana, thanks also need to go to Lindy and Helen for driving the work and to Miles who provided direction up front and advice along the way.
The Solr search engine provides a nice faceted-search feature, and tag clouds provide a convenient way of displaying and navigating those facets. The drill-down navigation through search results quickly narrows the search, and the visitor can always back out via the breadcrumb trail showing the history of tags that have been used to drill into results.
What makes this a bit different is that an empty search returns all results, most recent first. Although this can be a bit counter-intuitive at first, but it means that a visitor can either search or browse via the same mechanism.
We reckon it’s a convenient way to navigate blogs, and obviously this approach would suit other applications too, depending on what facets are available in a search index.
I look forward to hearing what others think.
Regards,
Vaughan H
No ribbon cutting ceremony? Thanks for the heads up though Nick, I didn’t even realise it was live! Great work everyone, looking forward to pushing the cloud out to the main site and I’m sure all the other sites will be wanting it soon enough…
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