Although I’ve used many Web based applications that employ tagging, I’ve yet to create an application of my own with this feature. But now, I have two potential projects on the horizon that could benefit from tagging, and I’m thinking about how to best implement this, both in the database and user interface layers.

So, I thought I would explore how to implement tagging in my own applications, from scratch, and write about them on this blog. Therefore, I won’t pretend I have all the answers–or even necessarily any good answers–but I will simply be trying to think through how to approach implementing tagging, and I will welcome any constructive feedback on those thoughts.

I wanted a way to make automated backups of Web sites that was easy to implement and maintain, easily understandable, and consistent across my hosts and server application architectures. I have explored a number of alternatives, including some rather large server based approaches, but they all seemed deficient in some way.

So, I ultimately decided to glue together mysqldump and wget with some bash scripts and cron as a lightweight way to make backups that could easily be adapted for my different hosting configurations and different software architectures, now and in the future, while still being more or less consistent. As a bonus, this approach is implemented almost entirely on the machine I use for development, so there is very little that I need to install and configure on the host machine for each site. This post explores this approach; if you have a similar need, you may find it helpful.