My first more or less major project at knallgrau has gone online. While this is just a pre-release the overall idea and structure of Tagview is already apparent.

The idea behind Tagview is to parse the rss feed from Twoday Blogs, send the text to Tagthe.net and receive tags (derived from the passed text). Since the tag quality of Tagthe.net has improved a lot during the last time, the tags are really matching the blog posts. Tagview displays different tag clouds for topics, persons and locations. In addition there are also clouds which display the tags from the last hour, the last 24 hours, the last week, and in future also the last month.

While Tagview only parses the twoday blogs, it is possible that in the future there are different Tagview installations, for example also for twoday.tuwien.ac.at. It would also be possible to parse any rss-feed, just some minor changes in the code would be necessary.

So, whats next?
I am currently working on a so called Trend Cloud. This special cloud displays the tags from, lets say the last week, in relation to the cloud of the week before the last week. Hence it will render quite interesting clouds, for example around easter the tag easter will be quite large, and so on.
Besides this trend cloud there are some more features to come, so stay tuned…

twoday.tagthe.net

Today i talked with Andreas Klinger about some issues we encountered using Gmail.
Besides the interesting idea of a small workflow management that would probably be interesting only to “high end” users, there are three issues that we miss most:

1.) Wildcard Search
Sometimes you are searching for phrases that you can´t remember correctly, e.g. you want to find mails from Mr. Nahasapeemapetilon but for some reason just cannot pronounce his name. A search with wildcards would be very useful in such cases, or simply the possiblity to search for a partly phrase, like “Naha” in this example.

2.) Different Signatures
I have got several email addresses and manage them with Gmail. So far so good, but i would like to have different signatures for different accounts, not a great feature, but it would be very very timesaving.

3.) Smarter “From”-Address
Like i mentioned i have got different email accounts within the same Gmail account. When i receive mails to an address different from my default address and i hit the reply link, it would be nice if the “from:” address would be the same the email was addressed to. I forget to change the “from” field a lot, and of course this could be quite confusing for my contacts.

A nice solution for a whole bunch of problems / issues / ideas would be the possibility to write plugins for Gmail, that would solve lots of issues.

But all in all i am really satisfied with Gmail, in my opinion it is the first webmail service that is “useable”, without thousands of ads and a straight forward, simple and powerful interface.

I just updated the website references here. You can now get an overview of my website-related work with some info about the individual project.

This list contains my personal pages as well as corporate sites i have made.