Simon Willison’s Weblog

Tags with descriptions. Tiny new feature on my blog: I can now add optional descriptions to my tag pages, for example on datasette and sqlite-utils and prompt-injection.

I built this feature on a live call this morning as an unplanned demonstration of GitHub's new Copilot Workspace feature, where you can run a prompt against a repository and have it plan, implement and file a pull request implementing a change to the code.

My prompt was:

Add a feature that lets me add a description to my tag pages, stored in the database table for tags and visible on the /tags/x/ page at the top

It wasn't as compelling a demo as I expected: Copilot Workspace currently has to stream an entire copy of each file it modifies, which can take a long time if your codebase includes several large files that need to be changed.

It did create a working implementation on its first try, though I had given it an extra tip not to forget the database migration. I ended up making a bunch of changes myself before I shipped it, listed in the pull request.

I've been using Copilot Workspace quite a bit recently as a code explanation tool - I'll prompt it to e.g. "add architecture documentation to the README" on a random repository not owned by me, then read its initial plan to see what it's figured out without going all the way through to the implementation and PR phases. Example in this tweet where I figured out the rough design of the Jina AI Reader API for this post.

# 18th June 2024, 4:50 pm / blogging, github, projects, tagging, ai, generative-ai, llms

WildlifeNearYou can now tag your Flickr photos for you. I’m really excited about this feature: if you opt-in, WildlifeNearYou will now write name and latin name tags to your Flickr photos after you’ve marked the species in the photo. This is even more interesting when you combine it with our suggest-a-species feature (the photo won’t get tagged until you’ve approved the suggestion). We also set the location on photos which don’t yet have one, but the real fun is the machine tags we’ve added, which allow developers to use the Flickr API to find photos by their WildlifeNearYou metadata (trip, species and place IDs). As a neat extra touch, the identifiers we use in the machine tags are the same as the ones used by our custom wlny.eu URL shortener, so it’s trivial to turn a machine tag in to the URL for that page on the main site.

# 4th February 2010, 5:01 pm / flickr, machinetags, metadata, tagging, wildlifenearyou

Temporary Mapping: Solar Decathlon. The OpenStreetMap default renderer supports start_date and end_date tags, meaning you can map temporary installations (in this case the 2009 Solar Decathlon on the DC National Mall) and have them automatically appear and disappear at the correct times.

# 13th October 2009, 3:18 pm / andrew-turner, mapping, openstreetmap, solardecathlon, tagging

Guardian + Lucene = Similar Articles + Categorisation. Alf Eaton loaded 13,000 Guardian articles tagged Science in to Solr and Lucene and is using Solr’s MoreLikeThisHandler to find related articles and automatically apply Guardian tags to Nature News articles.

# 11th March 2009, 12:53 pm / alf-eaton, full-text-search, guardian, lucene, naturenews, openplatform, search, solr, tagging

Film + Food & drink | guardian.co.uk (via) The Guardian’s publishing system supports tag intersections based on the URL; this page shows all film stories that also mention food. There’s even an RSS feed.

# 23rd August 2008, 11:18 am / feeds, film, guardian, intersection, rss, tagging

The Zonetag API Goes Public. Awesome new API from YRB—given a cell tower ID can provide both a location and a list of suggested tags, based on data collected by ZoneTag.

# 2nd June 2007, 12:53 am / api, cellid, location, tagging, yahoo, ydn, yrb, zonetag

Flickr Machine Tags. A new feature for API developers that lets them stuff arbritrary namespaced key/value pairs in to tags and query them using the API. Even without range queries, this will enable a ton of exciting new third party developments.

# 24th January 2007, 7:54 pm / api, flickr, machinetags, tagging

Introducing: World Explorer and TagMaps. “Can we automatically extract information from Flickr geotagged images to create a rich visualization of the world we live in? The answer is: you bet.”

# 19th January 2007, 9:55 am / flickr, maps, tagging, yrb

del.icio.us: casting the net wider. system: tags are a really neat way of adding specialised tag features.

# 14th June 2005, 9:01 am / delicious, tagging

Tags != folksonomies && Tags != Flat name spaces. Clay Shirky’s latest thoughts on tags.

# 25th January 2005, 10:54 pm / clay-shirky, tagging

Jon Udell: del.icio.us. Jon is doing some interesting things with the del.icio.us tagging system.

# 12th August 2004, 5:03 pm / delicious, jon-udell, tagging