A royal one.

I don’t mean implementing a tagging system, and I don’t mean tagging things for your own consumption later on, but using other people’s tags to find information they have posted is and even when you find something you are rearely left with any confidence that you’re seeing all that you should.

The problem is that everyone has their own notion and conventions of what tags to label things with or how detailed or broad you should be with the categorization and there has been little work done (that I have seen) to deal with the issue

Take two prominent examples of this from the past few weeks—Newsvine and the SXSW Interactive Festival.

I’ve just uploaded pnh_tag_test.html (UPDATE: see note at end of post)

Its just a simple document that I thought I’d share… but for all its simplicity it does a lot of work.

So what is it?

Over time as part of my development process I’ve evolved a large file of HTML tags and content that gets included into the templates I build and used as a base for CSS coding and testing. Just use your favorite include method or copy & paste the content into your HTML document and start working.

Early in the development process, somewhere between evaluating a static PSD file and having functional templates there comes a time to code the styles for the display and typography on a page. Since a few paragraphs of lorem ipsum typically isn’t enough to work with, this expanded sample makes a great time saver.

But what continues to impress me is not the time saved in having a document with a bunch of tags already dummied up. It’s not the number of times I’ve dropped the file into a template and caught some sizing problems somewhere or that margins on adjacent elements aren’t playing well together. No, the real value has proven to be in the use of this document for review and reference further along in the process. Designers love seeing everything there in one place for them to comment on and it makes for an easy deliverable to keep clients involved with the build while you’re working out details with more complex content areas.

Surely its not the only tool in the development and review process, but for just a silly chunk of markup it has proven as an invaluable tool so I thought it time to share.

UPDATE 2010.08.15 An updated version of this file, which I still use often on projects, can now be found on GitHub in the PNHTagTest Project.

My morning so far:

1. Wake up
2. Hit the mouse to wake the computer
3. Walk away for a few minutes to wash up and put coffee on
4. Sit down to skim some feeds that updated overnight and see something interesting
5. Hit my Mark in Magnolia bookmarklet intending to file it away for later
6. Laugh, cry, curse, shake head, try the .net, laugh some more, cry some more, shake head some more, try the .org see it redirects to the .com, laugh some more, cry some more, shake head some more
7. Make a post reminding people to RENEW THEIR DOMAINS
8. hit CMD-D
9. Go off looking for something to eat

A project I’ve hand my hands more on then off during my spare time in the last few months has been the redesign and relaunching of the web site of the Web Standards Project which made its debut at SxSW and is now live for the world to see.

Lots of different goals came together to form what I think became a great site—major kudos for that should go to Andy for the design and Kimberly for the WordPress implementation.

Molly kicked off the new site with The Buzz is Back, and on his own site Andy Clarke gives us a brain dump in Designing for The Web Standards Project.

Though the new site is up, that isn’t the end of the work. One of the things that the redesign effort seems to have done was spark energy that should turn into some more great efforts from the group in the next year.

And now I shall officially put the whip away.

Via Battle of Ontario comes a short list of The Worst Hockey Logos Ever!. It’s an interesting list of mostly non-NHL logos all of which I agree are pretty bad. Like this Vancouver Voodoo’s logo:

But I think there’s something old-tyme-y about this Brandon Wheat Kings logo: