Now with Tags!
Death to Categories! Long live Tags!
I had been thinking of adding something like those new-fangled "tags" that every website seems to have these days because the current category paradigm seems too static. Well, I just implemented tags after some inspiration from Ross Poulton's post about tags with Django. I took it a step further and tried my hand at "multi-tags" like IMDB's keyword search. I don't think I'll spend too much time refining the tag selection, but it has potential...
For the interested, here's the function that I'm using to render pages when there are multiple tags in the url (the url regex captures any slug + / because I'm not smart enough with regular expressions to split the parts there). It uses a clever (maybe not) method of building Q objects to make a complex query. For one tag urls (like comedy, Django's generic views do the work.
def multitags(request,thetags):
query = Q(published__exact=True)
splittags = thetags.split('/')
for t in splittags:
# build a complex query
query = query & Q(tags__slug__exact=t)
try:
entrylist = entries.get_list(complex=query)
except entries.EntryDoesNotExist:
raise Http404
else:
# find the tags
tagobjs = [tags.get_object(slug__exact=t) for t in splittags]
return render_to_response('blog/tags_multi',{'tags':tagobjs,
'entries':entrylist,
'tagstring': ' '.join(splittags)})
Sly Lives?
Sly Stone is still alive?! For some reason, I had assumed that he died at a young age. The liner notes in the only Sly & The Family Stone album I have refer to Sly in the past tense. Not only was I shocked to hear (on the radio this morning) that Sly lives, but check out his blond mohawk! And he's 63 years old! Cool.
death dreams
Am I going to die soon? If so, I'd like to record here that I foreshadowed my own demise. If not, I'll go back and delete this entry...
Two nights ago, I dreamt that I was a child running away from the Grim Reaper. An unidentified little girl that I was running with told me that if I didn't look directly at Death's "face", I'd be safe. As ominous as Death was, and as hard as it pursued us, it could do nothing unless we turned around and looked. We still ran, however, because there was no telling where Death would pop up next, and even a passing glance would've killed us. At some point, the girl tried distracting the Reaper so that I could get away. I think that's how the dream ended.
Last night, I again met Death, but I wasn't a child. And this time, I could look directly at Death without being snuffed from the planet. Maybe Death wasn't as terrifying as I once thought. Not only could I look at this cloaked figure, but I even taunted the Grim Reaper in my dream. I made fun of its wrinkly, grey fingers and dared it to come after me...
Without warning, I jumped into another dream. This time I was riding a bike in Cambridge when I met my grandmother sitting in a wheelchair on the sidewalk. I left my bike and pushed her wheelchair through the deserted streets, looking for some unnamed destination. We crossed railroad tracks and unfamiliar passageways before I realized that we were lost. Even though mimi was irritated that I had gotten us lost, I remember feeling safe because at least we were lost together. After a while it didn't matter that we were lost; it didn't even matter where we were supposed to be going. I told her to hold on tight and ran us down a long, empty road as fast as I could, laughing the entire time.
I pushed mimi up a steep hill -- an enormous hill, in fact. When we made it to the top, the feeling of desperation finally hit me. We weren't in Cambridge anymore. Ahead of me were vivid red, green, and yellow fields as far as I could see. We were looking into a valley of farmland, far from any city that I know or any place I've ever been. I worried about being far from home but at the same time was in awe of my surroundings. Mimi told me not to worry about being lost. It was no big deal.
A car coming from the direction of the farms drove up the hill, and mimi vanished from my dream. It passed me, stopped, and backed up to where I was standing. There were four happy people my age inside. One of them saw that I had my camera (I hadn't noticed it until then) and gave me a small, point-and-shoot digital camera. He said, "you can have this. You look like you can use it more than I can."...
I ended up getting in the car and going with them, but I don't remember the rest of the dream. I know that it was definitely more mundane than the previous scenes.
So, what should I learn from these dreams? hmm...
Bumper Stickers
Found on one minivan on the way to work:
- Red Sox World Champions
- Bush/Cheney '04
- John 3:16
- NO JESUS, NO PEACE
KNOW JESUS, KNOW PEACE
- license plate: EPH4-32
