Friday, August 5, 2011

Feature of the Week: The Hidden Tag

Not so long ago we introduced Hidden SystemTags. SystemTags are tags, that usually come with a special ability, such as markup (e.g. myown lets one of your posts appear on your cv page) or certain functionality (e.g. send forwards posts to another user's inbox).
Hidden SystemTags are those among them, that are visible only to you who used it, but not to anyone else who might take a look at your posts or tags.

With the last release, we introduced a new such SystemTag that does nothing:
sys:hidden:<somethingVerySecret>.
It does nothing? Why use it then? - Well, the feature simply allows you to use private tags. You may use any tag you like with the prefixes sys:hidden: or system:hidden: and no one else will see them.
The sys:hidden-Tag (as any hidden systemTag) is visible to you once you hover with your mouse over the little cog wheel in a post's tag list.

Note, that the hidden tag is not meant to be a privacy feature. Rather, the feature allows to hide tags e.g. organizational-note-tags from publication lists for beautification.
The hidden tags are not visible on tag clouds and post lists, but, you can e. g. query for a certain sys:hidden tag and still find all posts tagged with it. For really private information the private note feature of publications will be the appropirate choice.

Happy Tagging!
Stephan