Tech Update: Tags are now case-insensitive

Tags stored in Savory used to be case-sensitive. This made for confusing user experience when users ended up storing two different variants of the same tag accidentally. For example, you could have some links tagged with "SQL" whereas others with "sql". The worst part was that the “sql” tag page will not list “SQL”-tagged items. Yikes!

We have now fixed this. In this first “Tech Update” post, we share a little behind the scenes peek on how we did it, and what this means for our users and for Savory itself.

Tags is what makes Savory the powerful tool to collect, organize and curate everything you find interesting on the Internet. So far, Savory was unforgiving of what you type in the tag input box. If you had 134 items tagged with “reading”, but your phone autocorrected the tag to “Reading” when you were stashing the latest hot take for reading later, you will not find it on the reading page. Sad panda.

To fix this, we decided to normalize all tag names to lowercase in Savory’s backend. This means that all variants of “reading”, like “Reading”, “READING”, even “rEaDIng” will end up in the same bucket.

The lowercase is more of a bookkeeping chore in the backend. On the app, you will still see the tag as you typed it. If you prefer “Reading”, you will see “Reading”. But, you will not (and cannot) have both “Reading” and “reading” even if you want to. When you first enter a new tag, it locks on to that variant and sticks to that even if you (accidentally) enter some other variant later.

The bottom line is that entering tags is less error-prone now. For some of you, the tag pages will become less fragmented. The icing on the cake is that it unlocks some future features for Savory, like a dedicated reading list pane.

If you have any feedback or questions, we would love to hear it.