Last week with our upgrade to the latest version of rails we also migrated ourselves over to using a new plug-in for tagging, acts as taggable on steroids. It has some convenient functions built in that let us easily make any object taggable. If you’ve got a big group of items that are all taggable, and you need to read the tags, it unfortunately does query after query against each individual row when you access the tag_list. Easy enough to get around, and probably not that difficult to extend the plug-in .. but when you’ve got 1.5 engineers there are only so many things that can be done each week! 
This week we’ve been having fun over here re-vamping how everyone can manage contacts in Crusher. Tags for contacts! Yep! If you’ve got a bunch of mailing lists, you can add them and put tags on them like “SF” or “Sacramento” or “coders” or whatever you want. As I’m going through writing this code I can’t happen but think to myself .. all these applications around the web need contact management. So many websites that I’ve signed up for get you to create your contacts and relationships over and over and ask for duplicate information. Maybe plaxo can step up their game a bit? Maybe they can do contact tagging? Maybe this is in the works and I’m just out of the loop …
but it’d be great to login to a new web application, click sync with ContactManager, and then be all set to go with pictures and everything .. and then be able to sync back and forth seamlessley .. or just always do your contact management in ContactManager. I’ll be happy to see this duplicated effort cut down so we can all focus on features more specific to the companies that we are trying to build
