Update 8/11: See other posts in Blogger Hacks: The Series

Update 6/25: Please read my newer post first. I'm aware of three methods for categorising with del.icio.us now, & you should see which of the three would work best for you!!!
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How-to 4/20:

I've wanted to add categories to this blog for a while, and I was able to do it this week thanks to del.icio.us and a couple of bookmarklets. Since this is a great addition to any blogger blog, I've been inspired to write my first How-to.

This will tell you how to add categories to your blogger blog using del.icio.us, and have the tags that you choose appear in the Technorati tag search.

Ingredients:

1 blogger blog
1 desire for categories
1 del.icio.us account
1 technorati account (optional)
2 bookmarklets as follows:

the del.icio.us post bookmarklet allows you to bookmark pages to your del.icio.us account using keyword tags of your choice. It will already be configured to post to your account on a page at [http://del.icio.us/myaccount], and when you sign up for del.icio.us you'll be encouraged to drag it to your link bar!!

The tag creator bookmarklet from Ted Ernst's blog automatically builds HTML tags for given keywords that do two things at once. They point to the page for that keyword in your del.icio.us account [del.icio.us/myaccount/keyword] but they do so in a form that makes them valid technorati tags too.

Disclaimer: I didn't write the bookmarklet, and I'm not trying to take credit for it. Here's a link to the blog of the man who did.

You will need to edit this script to delete Ted's del.icio.us username and insert your own. You can also customise the text that introduces your tags. Right click the bookmarklet in your link bar after you've dragged it there, and edit the script properties.

Now the method:
Get a del.icio.us account

Activate the account by confirming your "lost password" e-mail

Install the del.icio.us post bookmarklet on your browser

Install Ted Ernst's tagmaker bookmarklet as follows: [Update added 9/12/05]

Visit Ted's tagging post. Click his bookmarklet link in the post, & you'll be taken to a second (non-blogger hosted) page that allowed the script to be posted as a link. The URL for that page is:

http://humanistcenterofcultures.org/ted/TechnoratiDeliciousBookmarklet.html

On that page is a link called

"technorati del.icio.us bookmarklet"

& that's the link you want to drag to your links bar.

So...Once the script-link from the second page is on the bar in your browser, you should see a different set of properties? Right-click the bookmarklet, select properties and scroll through the code 'til you find Ted's del.icio.us signon at the end of the del.icio.us URL. http://del.icio.us/******

You don't want your posts to appear on his del.icio.us page, so change the signon (in asterisks above) to match yours. Then exit the properties window, & you'll be able to click the bookmarklet to generate tag-code when you're writing a post.

Edit your blog's template to include a sidebar link to your del.icio.us account, http://del.icio.us/myusername, labelled "categories" or whatever...

When you write your next blog post, click on the tagmaker bookmarklet, enter keywords that refer to the post (separated by a space only), click OK when you're done. The bookmarklet will automagically select the code for you to copy, & then you can paste the resulting code into your post.

Your post is tagged. Now publish it & go to the permalinked post page for your new tagged post.

Copy the keyword tags out of the post and then select the del.icio.us post bookmarklet. Add the same tags that you put on the post to the form, removing the commas if necessary, and save your blog post on del.icio.us.

Two things just happened. First your post appeared on your del.icio.us account page with the tags you assigned to it in the right hand column. This page will list all the posts that you upload and all the tags that you use. This is, in effect, your list of categories for readers to pick from.

Second, if you click one of the keywords in your blog post, you'll go to a page in your account for that tag. Del.icio.us/myaccount/tagword. This allows your readers to jump directly to a list of all of your posts that are tagged with that term. This page also puts up a second column of "related tags" & allows readers to either combine search terms to crawl your tagged posts or jump to a related tag.

Your blogspot blog now has categories!! Excellent. Simply add tags to each new post that you create and cross-post the link to del.icio.us.

These tags can also be seen by the technorati tag search, & will be included in their tag search results if your blog is listed on their service. If it isn't, you should go over there & add your site today. Interactivity City!!!

Limitations:

I don't know if it is possible to display a list of your tags directly on your blogspot blog. I have linked to my del.icio.us account very prominently and am relying on readers to use the category feature and then come back to my blog to read more.

There doesn't seem to be any way to include older posts in this process, other than opening them up in your blog editor & adding the tags. Who has time for that?

This is a very narrow use of del.icio.us, since instead of posting and tagging any page that I think is interesting, I'm only posting & tagging my own. I'm missing out on a lot of the "stuff it in your back pocket & save it to read later" functions.

Otherwise I think this is pretty darn cool, and a great workaround since blogger doesn't include categories. This is, actually, even better than categories, because you can invent new tags on the fly all the time and use them to sort your posts in both del.icio.us and Technorati's tag search.

Cool. Let me know if this works for you or if I've missed a step in my how-to.
Thanks.

See also: What's this?, Ted Ernst, Marnie Webb.

Update 6/2/05:

I have added a comment to this post to clarify the installation and use of the tag-generating bookmarklet that I'm using. As Melly points out in the comments, I wasn't as clear as I could have been. I hope the new addition helps.

I have also discovered a spectacular add-on and side benefit of this process. Extisp.icio.us is a service that provides a graphical representation, or map, of a user's del.icio.us tags. A del.icio.us signon is all that's needed to get a page that maps your tags. Check out my extisp.icio.us page, and my recent post explaining what the map is and what it is good for.

Update 6/23/05:

Got Firefox? Get Greasemonkey and make the process much more straightforward.

Update 8/11: See other posts in Blogger Hacks: The Series

Filed In: delicious, folksonomy, blogtech, tags, categories, blogger, how-to