The Claws Mail template feature allows you to create specific templates that format your email in precisely the way you want them. Your compositions, your replies, and your forwards can leave your PC laid out exactly the way you want them. And it doesn’t take a programmer or guru to set templates up. You just have to understand the strings used by Claws Mail that allow you to insert specific, pre-configured fields into the body of your email.

Figure 1

You can create templates within one of two windows: “Preferences for current account” or “Preferences” (the former only configures templates for the account being used and the latter configures templates globally). Both of these windows can be opened from within the Configuration menu. Once in either of these windows go to the Templates section where you will find  three tabs (see Figure 1): Compose, Reply, and Forward. The first thing you must do is decide what type of template you want to create. Most often people use the Reply template so they can format how they want their replies to look.

As you can see, in Figure 1, I have already created a template. The template I have created does this when I reply to an email:

The first line of the reply reads In a recent email ORIGINAL_SENDER said the following:

QUOTED_EMAIL

to this REPLY_SENDER says:

BODY_OF_REPLY

A: Because it makes understanding the conversation harder?
Q: What is wrong with top posting?

• Where ORIGINAL_SENDER is who the email came from.
• Where QUOTED_EMAIL is the quoted text of the email you are replying to.
• Where REPLY_SENDER is the full name of the user replying.
• Where BODY_OF_REPLY is the text written in the reply.

You will also notice a bit of snarkiness at the end. ;-)

To achieve this layout I used the following pre-defined tags:

• %N – Original sender.
• \n – New line marker.
• %Q – Quoted message body.
• %af – Full name of sender (me).
• %X – Cursor position.

The %X tag is one of the most interesting of the tags. It is with this tag you define where you want your cursor to be placed when you begin the email. Because Claws Mail defaults to bottom posting, and has no means to change this to top posting, you have to define top posting by using the %X tag. So if I want to always top post in my replies I would create a reply template like this:

%X\n
Is my reply to an email sent by %N, that said:\n
%Q

To get a full list of all the possible tags to use click the Information button inside of the Templates configuration window. You will also notice you can use regular expressions in your templates. The possibilites abound!

Final thoughts

Once you start using templates in Claws Mail you will really begin to see how flexible this application is. Once I started using templates I never looked back to Thunderbird. Have you created a cool template for Claws Mail? If so, share it with your fellow Ghacks readers.

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Webmasters can however utilize tag pages better in their Wordpress blogs by creating so called custom tag pages which can contain any information they want. If you open the page above you notice that it does not contain a listing of blog excerpts but a custom page for that tag.

Wordpress provides the means to create those custom tag pages easily. Custom tag pages can be created in the theme directory of the Wordpress directory by adding a new template file to the theme. This new template file needs to begin with tag followed by the post slug of the tag. In the case of the Windows 7 Download tag it would have to be named tag-windows-7-download.php.

Custom tag pages have a higher priority than the default ones that show only excerpts of the posts. The easiest way to fill the custom tag with content is the following:

Wordpress looks for the following files in order to create those tag pages:

• tag-slug.php
• tag.php
• archive.php
• index.php

Look into your theme folder and see if there is a tag.php file. If it is copy its contents and create a new php file that is using the tag-slug.php as its name. If ther eis no tag.php look for archive.php and finally index.php.

Now simply add content to the file. It might take some experimentation at the beginning but it can be really worth it in the long run. If you have any questions or additions let me know in the comments.

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Tag 2 Find uses a different approach. It brings the tags known from indexing websites to the computer desktop. It is currently available in a preview version for the Windows operating system. Users who have been using services like Delicious and Flickr or run their own blog will be immediately comfortably with the software program. Any file located on the computer system can be tagged by the user. No user would want to tag all files as this would mean to work with hundreds of thousands of files which could take a lifetime. The software program can assist the user by automatically suggesting tags based on file names, directory names, file extensions and even metadata for multimedia files.

It is furthermore possible to include and exclude drives from the program completely. The software program will display a wizard after installation that is walking the user through the first initial configuration. The user can pick drives, directories and files that he wants to tag right away. Tag 2 Find can also be integrated in Windows Explorer to add tags right away for selected files.

It would be impracticable if the application window would have to be opened to search the files and tags. The application is therefor offering a floating transparent search window that can be moved around on the computer desktop. Entering tags into that search form will open another transparent connected window that is displaying the results which include hits, partial hits and related tags. A click on a resulting tag will show all the file names that have been tagged with the word or phrase.

Tag 2 Find can monitor the computer system for new files. The folders that are monitored can be defined in the application. It is for instance monitoring the Windows Clipboard and will display files that are copied to it for a while waiting for user input.

Additional options that might be interesting for some users are access to a tag cloud, automatic category management for selected file types, color coding tabs, drag and drop support plus import and export options for tags. It is really surprising how stable and extensive this early version of the software program is.

The only downside is the rather large resource usage. The software program uses roughly 23 Megabytes of computer memory while displaying the floating tags search box and about 53 Megabytes of virtual memory. Tag 2 Find runs on Windows XP or Windows Vista and requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0, an NTFS formatted file system (at least on the partitions that contain files that the user wants to tag and administrative privileges during installation.

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Related tags are shown as a circle around the thumbnails making it easy to explore more pictures by simply clicking on another tag. A click on an image loads that picture on the same site giving the user the option to visit the Flickr photo page to see or discover more from the user who uploaded the picture to Flickr.

Some tags have no related tags which essentially means that no related tags are shown around the thumbnails. Images are displayed pretty fast, it never took longer than a few seconds to display all 25 thumbnails. Guess it depends on the connection of the connected user though.

Read More:

Flickr Related Tag Browser

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If this has happened to you in the past – I know it happened to me – you should take a look at the software Foto Tagger. With Foto Tagger users can add textual information to the image. This looks like a small yellow sticky note with an arrow pointing to the object or person in question.

Those images can then be saved, send to other users or published on websites such as Flickr, Blogger or Livejournal. Those possibilities are build into Foto Tagger. It is however not a problem to export an image or folder to html with Foto Tagger to publish it on your own website.

Foto Tagger uses FotoML, an open XML-based photo annotation format, to save these information. I was not able to find a single image viewer supporting that format which is not that of a problem unless you edit the image afterwards in an image editor.

This could – and most likely will – destroy the tags. Foto Tagger lets you start image editors from the programs interface which solves the problem by using temporary files.

Read More:

Foto Tagger

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