Backup Brain Tags Support
Tagging your bookmarks can dramatically help with retrieval. With tags you can:
- find all your bookmarks on a given category, including the ones you forgot about from years ago.
- aid in search by guaranteeing you have something to connect it to a mental category even if that word doesn’t exist on the page.
- filter search results so that it’s only matching pages that also have a specific tag or tags.
- narrow down browsing results by combining tags.
Tag Name Restrictions
When creating tags, spaces are considered a separator". “cat houses” is considered to be two tags: “cat” and “houses”
Tags can’t contain any non “word” characters. For English words this means you tags can contain letters, numbers, hyphens, and underscores.
If you are creating tags in another language, it means letters, numbers plus anything in the “Punctuation, Connector” Unicode character set. Letters with diacritics are fine. For example, the system is happy with “feliĉa”.
Backup Brain will make sure that all tags are lower case so that you don’t accidentally end up with “Cats” and “cats” as two different tags. Any character that is not allowed will be converted to an underscore. For example: “Cat hOuses " will be saved as “cat”, and “houses”, but “cat-houses” or “cat_houses” would remain unchanged.
The Tag Cloud
The “Tag Cloud” in the right sidebar will show you all the tags that are found in the bookmarks you’re currently viewing.
By default you’ll see an alphabetized list of all the tags in your Bookmarks.
If you perform a search, or click on a tag, the list will condense and show you only the tags that are present in the documents returned by the search.
This means that after a search or clicking on a tag the Tag Cloud will almost always become smaller, because there are fewer tags attached to the Bookmarks in the current list.
Unlike most tag clouds the more frequently used tags are not larger than the other ones. I figure things are busy enough in there without adding size changes. If you would find that useful, please please file a feature request.
Viewing Bookmarks with a specific tag
Clicking on any tag in the Tag Cloud, or any tag shown under a Bookmark, will tell Backup Brain to bring up a new list of Bookmarks and limit it to Bookmarks with that tag.
For example:
Searching for “candy” and then clicking the “chocolate” tag would return every document that mentioned “candy” and was tagged with “chocolate”.
Clicking on the “candy” tag and then clicking the plus next to the “chocolate” tag would return every document that was tagged with both “candy” & “chocolate”.
Combining Tags
Tags can be combined with search results and/or other tags.
Once you’ve performed a search, or clicked on a tag, the tags in the Tag Cloud will have little plus icons next to them. Click that to filter the current results by that tag too.
Renaming & Merging Tags
Renaming
To rename a tag, click tags in the right sidebar, find the tag you want to rename, and click the edit icon.
Change the name to whatever you want. When you save, all bookmarks with that tag will be updated to have the new name.
Merging
If you rename a tag so that it has the same name as another tag, the two tags will be merged, and the one you’re renaming will go away.
For example, let’s assume I have “artifact” & “artifacts” tags. I want to merge “artifact” into “artifacts” and have the “artifact tag go away. I would edit “artifact”, and rename it to be “artifacts”, then save.