Recently we’ve been thinking about how to more effectively use Staction; and, being programmers and designers our minds first turned towards graphical or programmatic methods that we could implement in order to speed up our work flow within the app. But in the end, the most graceful solution turned out to be the simplest one; and typically, the hardest one to see.

One of the most striking needs, in our eyes, was a way to keep track of topics or general concepts within Staction. So we thought through how we could build a tagging system within Staction to allow users to define their own tags. It would be incredibly useful for things that don’t really fit the bill of a project, person or time entry (logins and passwords to the various services your group uses are a good example). But the more we thought about it, the more we realized that creating a new feature just to keep track of concepts would be complete overkill. Staction already has a great search function, and building more stuff just to track arbitrary words just wasn’t graceful, or a good use of time.

Twitter users out there will recognize where we’re going with this right away but, in the end, the obvious solution reached up and smacked us while we were tweeting away one day. Using hash tags would be a perfect way to keep track of topics in Staction! Hash tags, for those uninitiated, are just little blocks of text at the end of your update with a hash sign (#) before it. Two good examples would be: #password, or #login. Staction’s powerful search can then be used to grab that text and compile all the results for you. Instant tagging system with no programming.

We hope you’ll use this idea to work smarter and faster! If you have any other ideas that you think the Staction community should know about, please email them to info@pasteinteractive.com and we’ll share them.