Blogger Hacks, Categories, Tips & Tricks

Thursday, November 17, 2005
Simpy Instead of Del.icio.us for Categories?
John at LibraryClips pushes the debate, & hopefully the category system, forward once again, with his referral of Simpy as an alternative social bookmarking engine. There are notable advantages over del.icio.us. Most importantly for the "tags as categories" crowd, Simpy has a "search my bookmarks" box that you can drop onto your site (think the t'rati search box, but searching your tagged pages) and it posts the results on your site, in your template!! See Library clips:
There is no reason why you can’t use this implementation of Simpy to bookmark your blog posts.
If you view [this example] you can see a tag cloud generated from Simpy, and also a search box, exactly what I want to do in my blog, but wait there is more.

If you do a search or click on a tag from the tag cloud the results are shown within the blog, this is amazing, so now you can point your tags to an external site like Simpy, Technorati will still pick it up ( as long as you use rel=tag), and you are not pushing users away from your site as you can view results from the tag cloud within your site and not at Simpy.


I'm not sure whether the in-post results on the example blog are possible because it is hosted on a private domain, & whether the same functions could be duplicated on blogspot, but I will be checking into it.....

Filed in: , , , ,
Posted at 11:55 AM by John.
3 Comments:
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Anonymous Anonymous said...
Hi, this is Otis (Simpy). Let me know what you find out. I'd love to provide this functionality to bloggers.

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Blogger Johan Sundström said...
Del.icio.us still seems to hold the technical lead with their JSON feeds, as integration with your own site goes -- if we assume we live in a world where we are tied to only using client side solutions -- Libraryclips post their search form by HTTP post to their own site (which can't be intercepted by client side javascript) and does the page composition on his server backend.

That's not saying Simpy is on the right track here -- http://www.simpy.com/simpy/service/api/rest/ looks promising, and there are certainly much room left for improvement on easy integration over what Del.icio.us already offers. Maybe I ought to look into this, too -- from Otis' response, it seems easy to get in touch with the developers, suggesting additional improvements.

Come to think of it, there might be a good idea for me, as Del.icio.us goes, too; it hasn't struck me I ought to provide som user land tech feedback. :)

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Blogger Johan Sundström said...
(Oops, lost a strategic "not" in that second paragraph. :-)


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