"Common" questions thread/board/whatever

[Ben]

If I enter the serach strings "LabVIEW Cluster Re-size" I get a link directly to the thread with those tags.

I have used two schemes for tagging. One lazy, the other more complete.

1) Manual tag entry. This is just me typing in what I think my tagging tool would do. Just enough to be able to find it if I really had to do so.

2) Using my tagging tool. In this case, I browse the hiarchy until I find a sub-section that closely matches what is in the post. I click and the sub-section and the tagging tool generates a set of tags to go with it. For the  tag above it produces the tags;

LabVIEW_Cluster_Re-size

LabVIEW_Cluster

Re-size

LabVIEW

Cluster

Cluster_Re-size

Becuase all of these tags are associated with a single posting they are linked together and show up in the "related tags". So someone searching on "Cluster" and "re-size" they can find that thread.

If users don't know about the word "re-size" the tag cloud for cluster will lead them to re-size.

So the individual words get associated with the compound tags.

There is another aspect of the taggings system I am exploiting and that is the feature that adjusts the font size based on the number of ocurences of the tag. This gives the chance to use the tag cloud like an outline and can quickly scan the tag cloud for the biggest word that meets my criteria. SO for the above case I can start with all of my tags, drill down into LabVIEW, then into Cluster and by that point my tag cloud will only conatian a handful of links.

SO...

Underscores help to organize tags.

Individual tags posted together provides the linkages.

But I don't stop after a single clcik of the tagging tool. I then find another catagory that is realted and click it. The subsequent links provide linakages between catagories. Still with the above example... the tag "LabVIEW_Cluster" is realted to "Array_Operations". So a diligent seracher using the tag clouds could start out trying to figure out how to re-size a cluster at run time and by browsing the tag clouds learn about array operations.

Last Step when I am dead serious about my tagging (usually happens when I am home alone with a case a beer and my laptop) I cut-n-paste the text of the post itself into the scracth pad of my tagging tool and delte all of the nonsense words and start generating hierachial tags for those words.

When I am done and the post is tagged, my "Tree of Knowledge" grows another branch.

I have to say the tags have worked out as well as I can expect. I admit that using my tagging tool requires some effort, so I can't expect anyone else to put in that type of effort.

For my part, Tagging allows me to help more people than by just answering a question. Besides we have a lot of people fighting to answer questions, so tagging lets me organize and highlight the best.

AND TO ALL POSTERS....

If you find one of your posting sudenly has a pile of tags at the bottom, concider yourself "Uber-tagged" which is a Kudos on steroids.

And if you don't like tagging, you can just shut it off and let the search engine do its thing.

Ben

[JackDunaway]

In the search engine, what takes precedence (a higher "Relevance" percentage) - the contents of a tag, or the contents of a post, or the title of the post?

[muks]

I have felt the tag is given higher importance when you search it in the messages.

[Ben]

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muks wrote:
I have felt the tag is given higher importance when you search it in the messages.

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I hope your gut feel is correct since tags require can involve an intelegent effort.

Example:

Memory Text in a post reading "If my memory serves me..." may have nothing to do with computer memory while a tag of "memory" SHOULD be associated with a post related to that topic.

Ben

[kriphlet]

Hi!

While you're all deciding the purpose of the forum, I have a very elementary question (at least, you'll probably think it's elementary). I've only been using LabVIEW about a week. 

I am using the write to spreadsheet function, and in one column of the spreadsheet I currently have 0s. I would like to be able to change the 0 to a 1 to mark specific instances in the data with a push button on the front panel. I have not been able to do this and I would greatly appreciate any ideas y'all have.

Thanks! 

[JackDunaway]

Hi, kriphlet, this forum is specifically for creating threads that discuss how to make the forums better. For a bigger audience to respond to your question, the correct board for asking general LabVIEW questions is here.