F.A.Q.

1. Tagging Basics

What are tags?

What are tags? They're simply topics or labels chosen by you--and other Theologika members--for any web pages (or PDF, PowerPoint or MP3 files), which can help you find those pages again later on. There is no limit on how many you can use so you can assign as many to each page as you think will be helpful.

Each tag can be one word or several so there's no need to push words together as you may have seen on other services. Tags also group related URLs together so creating them as a hierarchy enables Theologika to gather related URLs to enhance their searchability.

There is no fixed set of categories or officially approved Theologika choices; in fact, that would defeat the basic value of our service. You can use words, phrases, acronyms, numbers, whatever makes sense to you, without regard for anyone else's needs, interests, or requirements

What are the rules for tag names?

A tag can be numeric or alphanumeric. It can also contain any special character except underscore and hyphen.

Note: Tag names are always converted to all lowercase so Tag1, TAG1 and tag1 are the same. Also, even though you can put more than one space character in a tag name only one space is save: sp ace is the same as sp ace.

What makes a good tag?

A good tag expresses one, and only one, concept or attribute and is meaningful for you and your community or work group. Beyond tags that capture basic categorization, like location or type of business or activity, quality or other arbitrary value and quantity can be very helpful. A favorite bike trail in Marin County might have tags bike trail (what is it) and Marin County (where is it) but adding favorite as well can be very helpful when planning a ride with friends who're using Theologika before talking with you.

  • One idea: The most important ingredient in a good tag is that it captures one, and only one, concept or attribute. For instance, looking at a restaurant webpage such as Nemo Restaurant you might consider creating a tag 'restaurants Miami' but this would fuse two ideas together and so instead we recommend you use two tags, restaurants and Miami. Since Nemo describes its cuisine as New American you can add that as a third tag and down the road you can find it through any one of the three.
  • Your words: The second major quality of a good tag is that it's meaningful for you and your community or work group. For example when discussing the latest hot restaurants or clubs some people use the word trendy while others say hip; in your directory use the one that best fits your style.
  • Quality: Further, good tags are useful in helping you remember what you thought about a restaurant, CD or biking trail. So tags like good and bad, long and short, fancy and simple are often appropriate. Two or three years from now, if someone asks you for a fancy restaurant in Miami, just search your directory and see how Nemo Restaurant shows up!
  • Quantity: In this same sense, consider using descriptive words as tags rather than quantities. For example, instead of making a set of tags to describe the length of hiking trails such as "< 2 miles, 2-5 miles, 6-10 miles and > 10 miles" you might want to use "short, medium and long." This is particularly useful when the range of values is really big, such as prices of TVs, PCs and digital cameras but don't hesitate to be as specific as needed for your purpose.

What doesn't make a good tag?

In addition to capturing the concepts you think of when looking at a web page, you may think of adding tags that would be selected by other people. For example, the words movie, film and cinema have very similar meanings yet on close examination have somewhat different connotations and so are used by different groups of people. Trying to force these words to have exactly the same meaning in Theologika instead collapses the different groups into one and lowers the actual information value of the tags.

Spending too much time puzzling out the perfect tags for a set of pages doesn't really help either. Using Theologika is a way to make your time on the web more productive and if a particular word or phrase was what you thought of when considering how to include the page in your directory, odds are that you'll have the same words come to mind when you search for it later.

2. Directory Elements

A Theologika directory is a set of resources (generally web pages but also other items like image, PowerPoint and PDF files that have a public URL) on the Web selected by you, searchable for you and all your friends. Besides the web resources you add to your directory the other elements include:

  • RSS Feed: Eevery directory has an RSS feed, which can be refined with one or more tags added on to filter by specific tags of interest.
  • Watchlist: This is a list of other Theologika directories you want to track or have available for easy searching.
  • Directory Tags: This is a list of tags which are applied to all the pages in your directory. For example, if your directory is about biking in California you can use "biking, California" and if it covers web application development you can use "web development, web programming, application development." Add, edit and delete them on the Directory Tags screen.

Note that resources saved by you also appear in All Directories searches, available to all members, and in the Watchlist of other members who add you to his or her list though you may control the visibility of any or all of your saved resources by setting the visibility on each one.

Changing member name, password or registered email address

Go to My Account > Update Profile and enter the email address or description.

What if I forget my password?

Open the forgotten password page and enter your user name or email address; the password will be emailed to the address you gave when creating the account. If this doesn't work please email Support.

3. Adding Content

There are four ways to add items to your directory:

  • Tagger browser buttons: Tagger is a button (Techno speak - A small JavaScript) which you add to your browser (Links folder in Internet Explorer, Bookmarks Toolbar folder in Firefox) so you get a button that's always visible on the toolbar while you surf. When clicked a new window opens so you can assign your tags, add a note and even change the default title if you like; you can even email the link directly to friends or co-workers as you save it to your directory.
  • Firefox toolbar extension: You can install this toolbar to Firefox 1.5 and newer. It includes a button to open the same tagged window, a text field to enter searches in, log in or out, and switch to a different account if you have more than one. The extension also adds Tag! Theologika link to the browser right click menu.
  • Internet Explorer menu add-on: With this script you add a key to the Windows Registry that adds a 'Save to Theologika' choice to the browser's right click menu.
  • Save from a Search: Whenever you search in Theologika and the results include items not already in your directory, a link labeled Save is shown next to the item's title and clicking it opens the tagger so you can add the item to your directory. Note that if the item is already in your directory, the link will be Edit instead and clicking it will open a menu that allows you to edit the title, add or edit the note, remove the item from your directory or retag it.

What's saved when I tag a page?

We save the URL, page title, the tags you assign, a note (if you write one) and a copy of the page itself. If you don't assign any tags while saving a page to your directory, we give it the special untagged tag so you can (when you chose) easily find the link later. The copy of the page is used when you and other members search in Theologika but is not available for viewing.

Deleting or retagging an item

If you want to delete an item from your directory, simply click the icon containing a "-" sign. Subsequently a pop-up box will appear asking whether you really want to delete that item, and then click Yes. Please note that once you delete the item there is no undo so while you can find the page and tag it again any note you entered is lost.

Use retag when you want to remove one or more, but not all, of the tags associated with one of the pages saved to your Theologika collection. If you want to remove all the tags and start over with a page, using the Remove choice

4. Search and Navigation

Navigating Theologika

The main way to navigate in Theologika is with topics, which you can type in to the text box at the top of all search pages or select from the Tags box on the left side of search pages. Clicking a topic in the Tags box always refines your search and narrows the result set to those items which have both (or all) the topics.

When I search, can I limit it to only parts of Theologika?

When you search, either by typing in a word or phrase or clicking a topic in the Refine Your Search box, you can choose from four different scopes: only your own directory, popular Web 2.0 blogs or the directories in your watchlist. Switch to a different scope by clicking the name of your choice; the active scope is indicated by the tab on top of the search box.

What's a watchlist, and how do I search it?

A watchlist is a list of users you find having interesting lists (and that's why you decided to put them in your watchlist). If you want to search your watchlist only, you can either click the radiobutton next to it, or click on the link "My Watchlist".

Can I sort the search results?

Sure! You can sort the results by popularity or most recently added. Just click the Sort by (popular | recent) selector at the top of the search results listing.

Refine With Tags

Here you've found a bit of our secret sauce, part of what makes Theologika different from other similar web services. Our system analyzes your search and compares it to the topics available within all of Theologika (or the directory you're viewing), selecting the most relevant to include. This means that, as more topics and pages are added to our database, the same search will return different, more relevant sets. The way you and other members organize topics in your collections are of course a significant component of the calculation.

Searching with URLs

Theologika uses a very simple scheme for its URLs and this means you can type your search directly into your web browser as the URL. The scheme is search.theologika.net/search/topic1/topic2 (substitute your desired search topics for topic1 and topic2); for example, search.theologika.net/search/restaurants will get you all the pages assigned the topic restaurants and search.theologika.net/search/restaurants/New York will get you all the pages assigned the topics restaurants and New York.

Notice that in the second example the topic (New York) has a space in it, that's fine since Theologika supports multi-word topics without requiring you to squeeze them together. If you want to limit your search to just one directory, your own or any other member's, substitute the real member name into the following pattern: search.theologika.net/links/membername/topic1/topic2. To search in your watchlist--you must be logged in for this to work--use search.theologika.net/network/topic1/topic2.

There are two more features in how you can sepecify a more precise search in the URL:
  • Use quotes: http://search.theologika.net/search/"a quoted term", such as http://search.theologika.net/search/"san francsico bay area", which tells our service to only show exact matches.
  • Use advanced search operators: http://search.theologika.net/search/tag:term, such as http://search.theologika.net/search/tag:ajax. The difference between searching for tag:ajax and the plain text ajax is that when you search for plain text you'll find all documents containing the term in the title, note, url or tag (for example, items tagged "ajax world" will also be matched). When tag:ajax is used only documents with the exact tag ajax will be found. The same is true for all the other ASOs.

RSS Feeds

RSS feeds that you can subscribe to in your favorite reader are available on Theologika for every combination of a scope and set of tags. For instance, you can subscribe to the pages saved with the restaurants tag in your own directory, your watchlist directories, and all of Theologika. To narrow the filter, simply add tags as you would in a normal Theologika search such as restaurants in Palo Alto.

5. Community

Watchlists

The watchlist lets you subscribe to directories made by other Theologika members who you feel publish useful and interesting material, to which you want quick and easy access. A Watchlist is a list of users you find having interesting lists (and that's why you decided to put them in your watchlist). You can add a person to your Watchlist in the following ways:

i. You can click the (+) sign beside every username in the content. If you are logged in there will be a pop-up message that will ask you whether you want to add this user to your Watchlist. Click Yes. If you are yet to login, on clicking the (+) sign the login pop-up will appear where you can login and then add the user to your Watchlist.

ii. Go to My Account>My Watchlist Settings. In this page add the user id of the person whom you want to be in your Watchlist.

To search only in directories maintained by members on your list, rather than any single directory or in all of them, just click the My Watchlist link at the top of each page and search as normal. Additionally, you can limit access to some or all of your content by selecting My Watchlist for visibility when saving a page to your directory.

To add a subscription, go to that member's directory. At the top of the list of the saved URLs are one or two actions: Send an email to [member], which is not visible if the member turned off this option, and 'Like [member's] links? subscribe to them. add [member] as your contact.' Click this action link and the directory is added to your list. You can also add someone as a contact by sending him or her an invitation; if the person accepts the invitation and registers with Theologika, they'll automatically be added to your list. To remove someone from your Watchlist go to My Watchlist Settings and click the Remove link adjacent to the member's name.

6. Oh no, my Firefox extension is not working. What could be the problem?

If you have been using the old Theologika and the Firefox extension provided by the old site, that extension will not work with the new Theologika. Please update to the new Firefox Extension here.

7. Can we still import content from blogs?

Hmm,No, currently we are not offering this feature.

8. I am not able to get the public http API of the new site.

To provide good content to our members, currently, we have disabled the public http API.