development corrupts

Back in January, I realized that you could probably figure out which individual tags filter you were viewing by using the (newly-added) parameter to each Userlite data_link:

3:09 AM me: hm
3:10 AM me: ma thinking of s2 at the moment
does this entry : http://community.livejournal.com/changelog/4356263.html mean that we can determine what tagspage we're on by checking the data link?
3:13 AM murklins: Looks like, but how do you check the data link?
3:14 AM me: Page has a hash of data links

I meant to play around with it, so I posted about it to remind myself, and then promptly forgot.


Then in May, murklins(<3) needed to customize certain tags views, and reminded me about my idea:

12:51 AM murklins: Hey, this is how we find out if we're on a tags subset of the recent entries page right?

if ((size $this.data_links_order) > 0) {
  if ($this.data_link{"rss"}) {
    var Link dlink = $this.data_link{"rss"};
    if ($dlink.url->contains("?tag=")) {
      print "A Tags Page";
    }
  }
}

12:55 AM me: hee
I don't know :)
I don't tihnk I've ever seen that before
though the concept seems familiar, but my mind might be playing tricks on me
12:56 AM murklins: Oh, it was your idea! :)

And I remembered that I'd had that idea before, and decided to do something with it some day. (And then promptly forgot about it again.)

Then someone made an entry in s2flexisquares asking whether it was possible to hide a sticky post when filtered by tags. And I was happy that I'd finally have a chance to play with the idea (almost a year after I first thought of it), so I wrote code and replied with it. Then she asked me whether it would be possible to make it so that you could show the sticky post only for certain tags, and after shaking off some rust I came up with this code.

It could be more flexible -- right now it won't work if you filter by multiple tags, but it's good enough, and I'm not crazy enough to try implementing a join/split function in S2.

(What if I made the tags an array instead of a hash? That would make it easier to input tag names -- ["tag1", "tag2"] instead of {"tag1"=>true, "tag2"=>true}, and it's unlikely that the list of tags this is used on would be long enough to affect performance either way.)

Other possibilities are to change colors or images depending on the tag that you're filtering by, or to change the behavior of entries with certain tags (for example, only show summaries for fic-related tags). And others! If you were motivated enough, you could make subtle changes to your layout for each tag you have. I'm not that motivated. :-)