Socrata

Over the past few weeks I’ve noticed more people using blist to make and share their Christmas lists. In the Merritt household all of us are making Christmas blists this year too. One feature that makes blist so handy is that you can borrow other people’s blists and effectively use them as a template for your own. In that spirit, I thought I’d go ahead and publish my Christmas blist here. If you want to make your own Christmas blist, just open mine and copy it.

Here’s what my Christmas blist looks like, in widget form:

Here’s how you can copy my Christmas blist:

• Open my blist. You can do that in one of two ways.
  • Either click on this URL to my Christmas blist
  • or click on the “Full Screen” button in the widget above

• After my Christmas blist loads up, just click on the [Copy this blist] icon in the menu ribbon. It looks like this:

• After you click the [Copy this blist] icon, a window will pop up to let you give your blist a name, optionally enter a description and some tags, and set the desired permissions. The most important decision you need to make is whether you want the content or just the column names. Unless you and I are eerily the same, you’ll probably just want the column titles without my actual data.

That’s all there is to it. After you’ve created your Christmas blist, you’ll want to share it with your friends and family. Need help? Here’s a really short primer on how to share your blist.

One of the subtle but powerful features of blist is tagging. The use of tags is entirely optional but people who use them love them. I want to spend some time in this post to tell you how to use and create tags in blist.

You can tag a blist or specific rows within a blist. You can also tag lenses. At the lens or blist level tags are used to help describe your data set. Later when you are looking for a blist that you created a while back, you might be able to find it more easily by searching by keyword. When you perform a search by keyword blist automatically searches blist and lens tags.  You can enter tags for a blist or lens on the Information tab in the task pane:

Notice my NFL schedule blist is tagged with “football.” As such, if anyone searches in blist for “football” they will find my blist even though the word football isn’t part of the title. It’s one of the tags, so the blist search feature will find it.

As much as I like tagging blists and lenses, row tags are more interesting. At blist we use blist for our internal bug tracking system. Here’s a partial screenshot of “blistzilla” as we call it:

Notice that two of the bugs have a little green tag icon. When I hover my cursor over the tag, a tooltip pops up to show me the contents of the tag. We use row tags to loosely group related bugs. So those two that are tagged are marked as “lensbuilder” bugs. When a programmer is assigned one bug with a tag, he’ll often look to see if there are more bugs with the same tag so he can resolve them as a batch.

One of the really neat futures in blist is the ability to quickly filter by tag. The Task Pane on the right edge of the blist has lots of handy features including the Row Tags pane. If I open that, I can see a list of all the tags in all of the rows in my blist. By default they are sorted by frequency, but you can resort them alphabetically if you like. Here’s the Row Tags tab in the Task Pane:

To temporarily see only the 6 bugs tagged with “lensbuilder” I can simply click on that tag in the tag filter. As soon as I click on that entry in the list, my view of instantly changes to only show the matching rows:

Of course you might want to return to an unfiltered view of your data. Simply go back to the Row Tags tab in the Task Pane and click on the “Clear tag filter” link.

And just like that you’ll see all of the rows again, unfiltered.

You might be wondering how to tag rows in the first place. Simply select (highlight) one or more rows you want to tag, then bring up the row menu. In the row menu there is a Tags field:

That’s all there is to tagging rows in blist. When entering tags you can enter single words, multiple unrelated words separated by spaces or multi-word expressions in quotes.

Give tagging and filtering by tags in blist a try and let us know how it’s working for you.