Random Recordings of Mental Meanderings

A couple of weeks ago, I tried adding a plugin to my website. I wanted to put tags on my pages, just because. I haven’t done it that much, but I wanted to see what I really wrote the most about. And who knows, maybe it will draw more traffic to my site.

So I searched the WordPress plugin Database, and found the WP Calais Auto Tagger and the WP Calais Archive Tagger. I thought “Cool! A plugin that will automatically tag my posts, and then another that will go back and tag the posts I already have! This will be great!”

I couldn’t have been more wrong. They do not work. First they didn’t work because my provider uses php 4, and a minimum of pHp 5 is needed. When I asked about backwards compatibility, the developer actually told me

There is not and will not be a backport of the Calais PHP class to a dead language. Tell your host that PHP 5 is more than 4 years old and you need an upgrade out of the stone age.

I was put off by that remark. First of all, obviously, the language isn’t dead if people are still using it. Secondly, I thought it was a bit snooty in a looking down your nose and spitting on you kind of way, as if I am not good enough for him, or at least the hosting service I use isn’t worth his time.. Thirdly, it wasn’t very customer friendly. If this guy is looking to make any kind of money, he needs to brush up on his customer service skills.

I contacted my provider, to see if they would put in an upgrade for php on the servers. I was told that while it would be nice, they can’t upgrade across the board because there are too many applications that their customers use which do not work in php 5 but work in php 4. So now I was stuck. That is, until yesterday.

I went into my email, and had a message from my hosting company. They had installed php 5 on the servers on which my websites were located, and told me how to modify my code to work with php 5. Now this is customer service. The hosting ompany I use is always good to me. Another example is a couple of months ago, I was running low on bandwidth, and they gave me more. I tried buying it, but they returned my money and just gave it to me. Now that’s good customer service. And again, yesterday, they showed me what a good company they are. I thought “Great! Now I can use those plugins!” For once, it seemed like serendipitously, things were going to go my way.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. The Auto Tagger and Archive Tagger still did not work. Nada, zip, nope, wrong answer. The Archive Tagger hung, and the Auto Tagger gave errors. Neither generated any tags. Needless to say, I was very much not impressed with this product.

So, I decided to try tagaroo. It doesn’t tag archives, unfortunately, but at least it works in generating relevant tags for posts. I have to now go back and manually generate tags on all the posts that I have written. It will be an intersting trip into nostalgia, re-reading all the posts that I have written over the years. I don’t even know that I will finish that project, because it is rather time-consuming to do. This is a hobby, not my life, and I have lots of other stuff to do.

At lest I have something that works, though, and that’s the important thing, going forward.