How can I let website visitors tag my website pages for me?

Question

I run a website that contains the text of a large number of public domain books on a specialist niche topic, spread over a large number of HTML pages.

I also have a fairly enthusiastic website audience that read the books regularly.

Sometimes there are topics on pages in some of the books that relate to topics on pages in other books. But I don't have the time or resources to manually go through every book and create HTML links for similar topics.

Does anyone know of any third-party web software that I could use to allow my website visitors to "tag" similar topics across different web pages, which might then be linked automatically via a tag cloud?

All the pages on the site are just standard static HTML pages (though I generate them using XSLT, as the books are all held in XML format) so it would be no problem to add, say, some JavaScript to each page if necessary and regenerate the entire site.

I would like the approach to be as hands-off as possible with me only having to get involved to clear up any tag vandalism or mistagging.

I already provide a Google custom search for the site which, to some extent, already enables users to find related material but I am looking for a human-based tagging/tag cloud approach that will supplement this.

Answer 1

For the tagging of pages, you're going to HAVE to store information server-side somewhere. Which probably means a database. I don't think there's any way to do this just with JavaScript/HTML.

Working with a database would mean working with a server-side language such as PHP or ASP. So I'd say this wouldn't be a hands-off solution.

You're best bet might be something like migrating your site to Wordpress or some other CMS that has built-in tagging, etc.

But it'd still be interesting to see if anyone else can come up with a better solution.