Apparently Firefox 1.5 may not play nicely with Greasemonkey, whether the whole thing or the individual scripts. Let's see how this impacts tagging for categories, whether this requires some script reconstruction, & whether there's a new greasemonkey version on the horizon....

Update 12/01: Johan reports that the new greasemonkey 0.6.4 is out & available, for all of you who upgraded to Firefox 1.5. See Userscripts.org for the updated version, & for the wiki that will tell you how to fix any scripts that remain broken w/ the new version.

Another method for categories, this one a combo of Google Blogsearch and Technorati Tags. Make the tags the keywords in your posts, then hard-code the Google Blogsearch search-string into your sidebar. Looks pretty good to me. LBBP is also (sensibly) starting with a small number of tags & not going technorati tag crazy like some bloggers I could mention... (er, that would be me...) Get the method from Skeptic Rant:

On my sidebar, I have added a tags area with a list of the tags I intend to use. I will add more tags as needed, but I intend to keep the list relatively short.

Each of the tags in the list is linked to a Google Blog search referencing the relevant tag. Because my blog is hosted by Blogger (Google) it is indexed almost immediately when I post. So, clicking on the search link brings up a results page, ordered by date, referencing all of the articles on my blog with those tags. And, since I have just started tagging my entries it also has the advantage of searching older articles for key words in the body of the posts in addition to the tags.

To make posting easier, I have added all of my tags as part of my default formatting template from the Blogger settings. Then, each time I post I just delete the tags I don't need.

So I'm guessing the tags are added in the post template as html blocks?

Rahul Gupta has posted a javascript that goes into your template, & will force the blogger link field to output the del.icio.us tags that you need for categories. Three steps to make it work:

1. Turn the link field on (Dashboard > Settings > Formatting > Show Link Field)
   
2. Paste the script into your template
3. Edit the script to point to your del.icio.us account instead of Rahul's.

This way you can tag as you write your post. You'll still need to bookmark the post to your account, but you can tag as you compose. This basically duplicates the function of the greasemonkey method, but if you're not on firefox, or if you'd rather hack your template than your browser, this is the way to go.

Thanks, Rahul!!

Update 11/30: In the comments on Rahul's blog, Greg points out that this may not be the best thing for visibility on Technorati, & suggests a fix.

Filed in: categories tags delicious blogtech

So, in response to a comment from Johan, and prompted by a nagging irritation that my post footers were becoming disorganised and could do with straightening out, I have enabled blogger backlinks on Freshblog.

Since this is a blogger hacks blog, & "off the peg" just won't do (because my template has been butchered to within an inch of its life...) I used the non-standard "custom" backlinks set-up provided by Jasper at Browservulsel. This seems to get around both the "won't work if you've got Feedburner" problem addressed by Improbulus, and the "can't cut and paste in Firefox any more" problem brought to light at Philosophy etc. Looks good from here!!

V. cool to see a graphic display of how many links there are in to the post, right there in the footer. I like. Of course this means that I'm running more scripts than Broadway, & if things slow noticeably here I will think about features that I can live without.... or sling into a test blog.

Some formatting still to do, perhaps. (You know you're in trouble when the footer is longer than the post) but the additional feature is working great. Many thanks, Jasper!!

While we're all over what's new at Del.icio.us, TipMonkies brings news of a new Del.icio.us extension for Firefox. This will add access to your account and a "post new" button to the toolbar, as well as enabling a pop-up post window, right-click posting, a del.icio.us menu on the menu bar, and del.icio.us search in the search box. Now that's what I call integrated!! Excellent. Will road test immediately. Thanks, Del.icio.us!! Keep it coming!!

Filed in: del.icio.us firefox webtech

Selling listings from Del.icio.us? I wonder what the folks over there will have to say about it? They don't charge for listings, after all... but the TOS seems to allow it, at least implicitly.

There's an assumption here that this guy's del.icio.us acct is busy enough that it'll be worth your while getting listed there (which I doubt, although as the commenters on Micropersuasion say, the buzz can only help to make this a busy site)...

In the "doesn't work as well as it might" category, (sorry, Patrick) the site is a tagroll / cloud, which means that you don't really know what you're getting 'til you click it. For a clearer explication of what's behind door #4, I guess he could switch over to a linkroll, and perhaps encourage a bunch of folks to paste that up. Then the exposure / increase in traffic might be worth the $20....

Of course, totally counter to my bloggy philosophy of the free exchange of ideas, & to the spirit of folksonomy, I think.

via Micro Persuasion

Oh, and while we're at it... Seems that Del.icio.us has had an extreme home makeover. More white, less grey, same blue. V. nice!!

Filed in: del.icio.us

Johan presents a helpful summary of the tag-passing adventure to date. While I was chowing on poultry and sleeping it off, the corner of the blogosphere that we call home was experimenting with integration. Here's some thoughts about where we are and where we might go:

• I'm still v. excited about / invested in the notion of category lists that are expanded upon your arrival at a blog. There's a level of coordination that will be required for this to work to full effect, though.
  
• We'll need to agree on categories
• We'll need to agree on menu formatting
• We'll need to agree to blogroll one another, and
• We'll need to agree to run the same version of the script.
  
• So why do I care about these expanded menus so much? Well because the relevance / value of categories would be increased if they were useful inter-blog navigation tools as well as being intra-blog sorting tools. Imagine selecting "blogtech" from my category list, reading a couple of posts, then selecting another blog from my "special" blogroll and finding "blogtech" pre-expanded with a list of relevant posts there too.... Pretty cool... and a way of generating customised microspheres of interest. What is most exciting for me is the fact that where you've been could influence the look of, or information displayed on, the blog where you are.


• Johan proposes some other ways to use the data in modifying sidebar entries on his blog.
  

"I could add a little "unfold " before the name, which might pop up a tree of a few recent post titles, show a tag cloud for Freshblogs' ten or twenty most frequently used tags, or similar, to convey an instant feel of whether the reader would find it worth her while going there for a browse, or perhaps subscription, while at it."

Some strong possibilities for the future. For now, though, I'd settle for a strong & attractive menu, in use on a half-dozen mutually linked blogs, with some categories in common, passing tags between them to test the utility of the tool. Very cool.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, see Category Integration Between Sites from Monday 11/21 (especially the comments) and Johan's Magic Delicious JSON Feeds.

Well... fake ones!! A great addition to Blogger Hacks: The Series that fills another frequently requested formatting gap on blogger. Johan at Ecmanaut has written a post describing how to add "next" and "previous" buttons to each post of your blog. They're not quite next & previous post buttons. They're actually links that navigate your archives by day, and the system is not perfect by any means, requiring a 100% site republish on every day that you post anything. Still... if Next / Previous links are what you've been missing, this is as close as you can currently get w/ Blogger.

First of all, thanks to everyone who checked in over the weekend, left comments, and engaged with the whole "tag passing" adventure that we're working on. Much appreciated. Stick around now... normal service has been resumed (for whatever that's worth....) & I'm sure plenty more tags will be passed.

Now, an interesting statistical thingumajigger. As part of the whole post-holiday catchup, I logged into feedburner to see what's hot in Freshblog Feedland. I find the most interesting part of this whole deal to be the reader stats, mostly because I'm blown away to see how many readers there are, and how many different ways there are to read a feed... even this lil' feed. Here's what struck me today. Lots of people are reading Freshblog's feed, but the bulk of the hits back to the site seem to be coming from bloggers who are tech-savvy and plugged in to the latest reader tech. 89 people subscribe in bloglines, which only resulted in 12 hits. 33 people have Freshblog as a Firefox Live Bookmark, and they were good for 133 hits in spite of the fact that I haven't updated all weekend. Clear winner, though, is Google Desktop. 24 subscribers, and 212 hits. Interesting. How does the presentation of content on Google Desktop & Live Bookmarks differ so that it encourages clickthroughs (or are these just early adopters / regulars who would click-through anyway?)

It will be another slow w/e here at Freshblog after a hopping week. 'tis Turkey Day, so I will be under the influence of a big dinner 'til at least Sunday!! In the meantime, if you're in the mood for hackery and madness, visit the sites in the sidebar.

For your holiday assignment, I'd like to invite you to check out the "tag passing" experiment that we'd like to conduct here at Freshblog. There are instructions in my post from earlier in the week. I know it looks like a lot to get through, but it isn't too hard to figure out, and there are serious implications for increased blogosphere interactivity, courtesy of Greg. It would be good to test this with a few more users, and with a slightly more expansive circle of blogs. Please comment on the original post, or leave a trackback, to express interest or provide other feedback. Your input is requested!!

Filed in: categories, tags, del.icio.us, blogger, blogtech

Athique of Me, Myself & this other stuff has been road-testing PocketBlogger, a free application for your pocket PC that will allow you to directly update your blogger blog. This seems like a fine idea for an application. Check out Athique's take on the service, and his requests for upgrades / extensions...

Filed in: blogger blogtech

How long is a new service out there before it is poked, prodded and generally hacked to suit. Well... not very long... After the hackery detailed in the previous post, Fritz at Cycle.icio.us has code to put Technorati Mini results in the sidebar of your site. Pretty cool. I wonder if it refreshes every minute, or just loads once when the page loads? Fritz?

Filed in: technorati, blogtech, search,

Technorati Mini... a useful tool or a "look at our new shiny servers" luxury add-on?

My first thought is that really, unless you're the Instapundit, who needs a search that updates every 60 seconds? I could see a 5 minute refresh for your favorite tags, or even of your favorite sites, but a 60 second keyword refresh strikes me as using a bazooka to kill a mosquito. The blogosphere updates frequently, of course, but the parts of it that each individual might want to track don't change by the second, do they?

That said, (and perhaps in a more critical tone than I intended....) how nice to see a service come out overpowered rather than underweight. For reaction, thoughts and development ideas, see:

• A Consuming Experience - speculating on the extra-beefy servers required to make this work
• Micropersuasion - where Steve provides instructions on loading the minisearch window in your browser sidebar.
• Library Clips - where John T points out the possible future application of mini for tag searches, and suggests the application of mini as a feedreader by auto searching an OPML file for updates every minute.... Wow. If it could do that, & you docked it in a browser sidebar, you'd have an auto-refreshing desktop feedreader. What about it, Dave?

and let's see where the mini leads us.... Perhaps tracking the conversation in a dedicated window will become a significant tool for interactivity & discussion.

Looks like Google woke up, smelled the coffee (mmmm, coffee) and came through with a one-click add tool that allows the easy integration of feeds into either Google Reader or your Google Personal homepage. V. cool. Thanks, Google, & thanks to Fritz for the heads-up.

to do with Navbar visibility in search engines. Rebelbagwan would like to make the navbar invisible to the crawlers, so that navbar content isn't reflected in the "description snippet" that shows in engine results. As I blogged last week, there are a couple of ways to make the navbar invisible to crawlers, and eyeballs, by making it go away. I don't recommend or advocate this (blogger tos violation?) & wonder if there's a template hack to stop the robots seeing the bar without making the bar go away?

Update 2/1/06: There is a new version of this service, Freshtags 0.5. See the Freshblog Intro, and check out the Freshtags site to get up-to-date code and information. Read on here if you're interested in the development of Freshtags and the initial roll-out, but be aware that the code posted here has been superceded.
_____
Pushing the envelope on the "tags for categories" method once again, Freshblog is pleased to announce a new sidebar menu for categories, using .js, that creates a list of recent posts in a category when you select that category from the list. The menu, developed by Greg from Vent, provides plenty of room for discussion and development, & makes strides towards the interactivity that is possible in the blogsphere. Here's the usual Freshblog what? why? how?, along with an invite for testing, feedback and discussion.

What: A sidebar menu of categories that generates a scroll-box menu of post titles below it when you choose a category. The >> symbol below the drop-down takes you to the anchor_tag + selected_tag page on del.icio.us. The scroll-box menu loads when you pick a category, shows post titles that are in that category, & lets you jump straight to the post page from the
sidebar. In-blog category navigation is born!!

NB: "anchor tag" is optional, and is the tag that is common to all posts in your blog. Handy if you have multiple blogs, or don't want all your tags listed on your blog.

Why: I've had some negative feedback re: taking people off-site to your post-list in del.icio.us. (even though, as I said a whole bunch in the beginning, all they can click on there are your posts, and they'll be right back!!) We want this to look integrated & slick, & we want the integration to keep people on your site, in your template, knee-deep in your ideas.

How: If you already bookmark your posts on del.icio.us for categories, you're home free. Just add one .js code chunk for the head of your template, edited to reflect your del.icio.us username and most frequently used _anchor_ tag, and one customiseable code chunk for your sidebar. Change the widths of the menu to suit, and you're all set.

Benefits: Readers see your post titles in your categories on your site, instead of going offsite.
When they select a post from the dropdown, they're taken direct to the post page, and the drop-down box stays open so that they can navigate direct to other posts in the same category if they choose to. Excellent.

Development:

The most exciting feature of this system grows out of the page reload. You'll notice that when you choose a category from the drop-down, the page reloads & the URL now ends in the selected tag. In addition to passing tags between archive & post pages on your blog, readers can pass tags between blogs. As an example, if you select "culture" as a category from the drop down box in my sidebar, a text box will appear containing the titles of posts that I have tagged "culture." This box will stay open on post, archive and main pages on Freshblog.... but hey, let's pass the tag!! Greg's Vent! blog runs this script too, and we share a category called "culture." If you've selected "culture" in the Freshblog sidebar and you visit Vent!, you'll find the "culture" category there pre-selected and the drop-down pre-expanded. If a number of blogs all operated using this script, you could navigate between them and be repeatedly presented with pre-expanded menus of relevant content in your area of interest.

The benefits of picking up on your readers' interests as they land on your page are obvious - you can show them relevant content in the navigation. But what if they arrive by search engine? Not to worry: this code will scan their search query for your tags. If any are found, it will quietly expand that category in your sidebar, showing your readers titles of related posts. Works with most search engines, include Google, Yahoo and MSN. To see it in action, visit Greg's Speccy Blog via Google, where a search for the phrase "exposed the writhing worms of drugs" returns only one result. You'll note that when you choose that link, the "drugs" category in the sidebar at Speccy will pre-expand for your navigating pleasure. Alternatively, do a Google search for "Freshblog" & visit this site from the results page. You'll notice that the category menu for posts in the category "Freshblog" is pre-expanded.

As a consequence of upgrading your archive menu code to pass tags, you'll also have the chance to add an archive count to your archive list, so that readers can see the relative activity of your blog from month-to-month at a glance. Using a bookmarklet to tag your archive pages, and a revised code for the archive drop-down menu, you can illustrate your posting volume in your archive menu. I have yet to implement the archive count at Freshblog, but you can see it in action at Speccy.

Code Snippets:

For your template head (add username and anchortag to replace the red text):

<script type="text/javascript">
// set parameters
del_user = "username";
anchor = "anchortag";

// Fetch tag set from delicious

document.write('<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://del.icio.us/feeds/json/tags/'+del_user+'/'+anchor+'?sort=freq&count=100">');
document.write('<\/script>');

// Fetch archive posts from delicious

document.write('<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://del.icio.us/feeds/json/'+del_user+'/'+anchor+'_archive?sort=freq&count=100">');
document.write('<\/script>');
</script>

<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://ghill.customer.netspace.net.au/tags/flex-tag_list.js">
</script>

For your category drop-down menu:

<script type="text/javascript">
list_side_tags(1); // drop-list
write_tagged_posts(10, 22); // 10 high, 22 wide
</script>

This menu will accept arguments for customisation as follows:

list_side_tags(x) where x is the number of rows in your scroll box.
write_tagged_posts(y, z) where y is the number of rows and z is the width in characters.

For your archive drop-down menu:

<select name="archivemenu"
onchange="document.location.href=this.options[this.selectedIndex].value;"
size="1">
<option selected="selected">- Select Month -</option>');
<BloggerArchives>
<script type="text/javascript">
u = "<$BlogArchiveURL$>"; n = "<$BlogArchiveName$>";
document.write('<option value="'+u+document.location.search+'">'+n);
c=archive_count(u);
show_count(c);
</script>
</option>
</BloggerArchives>
</select>

Bookmarklet to "tag" your archive pages:

javascript:anchor="anchortag";count=prompt('enter post
count');document.location.href='http://del.icio.us/api/posts/add?url='+document.location.href+'&description='+anchor+':'+tidy(document.title)+'&tags='+anchor+'_archive&extended='+count;
function tidy(descr){pos = descr.indexOf(':');return
descr.substr(pos+1);}

Insert your chosen anchortag at the appropriate place in the script.

Alternative:

See Greg's Speccy blog for a set-up that will work for blogs with less posts / less tags. If you'd like the code for that set-up, please leave a request & your contact info in the comments.

Discussion / Request for Feedback & Testing:

This doesn't change the input of the tags for categories system, but Greg's script does some significant and welcome things with the output. For discussion, please leave comments & trackbacks on this post, & help us take the del.icio.us tags as categories system to the next level.

This is oh-so beta at the moment, and all feedback is appreciated. The possibilities for extension and development include supporting multiple tags, a delicious-style cloud presentation and an integration with other blog category systems / sites that order content with tags... Greg is looking for more ideas and feedback, & you're the audience for the job!

What about SEO? Does the "URL?tag" format create multiple URL's for the same page and therefore weaken a page in an engine?

Apparently not so you'd notice. Sure, having multiple URLs pointing to the same physical page does "water down" your rank. So you wouldn't want your homepage split 150 different ways. But if it's targetted and useful, then given the way that Google heavily weights the URL for search rankings, it could be a help if used sparingly (eg foo-blog.com/ vs foo-blog.com?tags=lightning_strikes).

Secondly, the only way that Google would see the "tagged" version (in light of the earlier discussion about spiders not seeing javascript and the hand-coded "noscript" alternative menu) would be if someone hard-coded a URL in that way to bring a visitor to your blog in pre-expanded mode. I guess this would be done (if at all) consciously/deliberately so would bring focus. Also, the doubling up of anchor text and URL would be a powerful association from google's view - almost like a rel=tag link!

So, as long as your linkers agreed with you about which are your "power tags" and used them judiciously, it would help. The way that js is hidden from spiders will protect you from having a mass diffusion across hundreds of URLs.

And hey, what do we call it? There's some new tag functions at work here, that Greg's defined as follows:

• tag-fixing: the act of "hard-coding" a tag into a URL.
• tag-passing: the act of a reader carrying forwards their selected tag.
• tag-grabbing: the act of extracting a tag out of something that's not actually a tag e.g. search query, prior page etc.

Chime in with your feedback, responses, and requests to test. We're very interested in the possibilities of passing tags between blogs as a way of generating dynamic spheres of similar content that can customise the blogosphere, and allow readers to surf between sites while staying within categories. Exciting!!

You can initiate a blogger-search by hard-coding the links into your sidebar too (cosmos search stylee) and then inserting the relevant keywords into all your post titles. What with this being Freshblog, and all, the results (surprise, surprise) will stand in for categories.

See Netcf2 for instructions, and for the sidebar list code.

Update 11/22: Daniel has written a code-generator that will build the sidebar menu for you. Cool!

Fritz at Cyclelicious has written a script to query Google Blogsearch from a box on your site. You can do this from the navbar if you're on blogspot, but if there's no navbar, or you're not on blogspot, then this is the searchlet for you:

This code is based on the code for the search box in the Blogger.com title bar and uses Google's Blogsearch search engine. JavaScript is usable on any server. The disadvantage is that many people disable JavaScript on their browsers. This code will work for any blog that Google Blogsearch knows about, not just Blogger.com blogs. Note that if you run a blog with Blogger.com and use the Blogger.com title bar, you already have a search box at the top of your blog.

You can get fancy with the interface if you want and search by author, by tag to create a primitive categorization scheme, and so forth.

See Cycle.icio.us for the code, & for instructions on how to make the (minor) customisations that are required.

Filed in: search, blogtech, google, blogger-hacks

There's a post at Micropersuasion pointing to Google Sitemaps resources, (noteably a Sitepoint how-to) which brings up an interesting conundrum for blogspot blogs.

First, on sitemaps, see the exhaustive post from Improbulus at A Consuming Experience. This is an interesting Google service that enables them to crawl your site more comprehensively, generating stats that are of use to you in the process. If your site has a feed, the service can read the feed as a sitemap & detect updates that way, which is pretty cool. Here's the thing, though. For full feedback of stats, they ask you to verify that you're the site owner by uploading a file to the root of your site. Presumably this is a measure to prevent the gathering of competitive intelligence. Laudable, since "valuable" site stats shouldn't fall into the wrong hands. Of course here's where things get tricky because verification is a problem here in blogspot land!!

I can't upload anything to the root of the server this blog is hosted on, & so can't take full advantage of the service. Speedy crawl is nice, but speedy crawl with the full-featured stats detailed at Sitepoint would be cooler. So hey, Blogger / Google, I'd like to be able to verify, please!!

The irony is that the official Google Sitemaps blog is a blogspot blog, & so presumably has a limited sitemap also....

I have posted about this before, & would like to see the integration between Google's divisions to enable this feature for blogspot.

Mojotek is thinking of signing up w/ a few traffic exchanges. I'm not sure that any of these result in repeat visitors / regular readers / subscribers. In my limited experience, people just jump from blog to blog to earn the service credits, & wait for the time to tick down so that they can click the number and move on....

So here's a thought for traffic exchanges. You choose a topic / directory area for your own blog when you register your site. What about reader preferences too? As a reader you could choose a handful of topics that you wanted to read about, and the blogs that you were served up would at least be of passing interest to you, increasing the likelihood that you'd spend quality time there & comment, interact or subscribe. Decreasing the likelihood that you'd have to spend two precious minutes waiting for some random blog to go away...

I stopped surfing blogexplosion long ago, because I never saw anything that interested me & I'm sure that the people who were presented with my site at random didn't like it either. If I had been in a blog-explosion micro-sphere for blogging, or technology, or folksonomy, or something, I might have felt more like participating.

Filed in: blogtech, webtech, traffic, micro-spheres

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: blogtech, tags, categories, simpy, del.icio.us

Who'da thunk that Google Base going live would not be the highlight of my bloggy day?
Eclipsed by a tagroll.... I'm so easy to please!!

Anyway. Google Base is live. I stil have no clear idea what it is for, but at least now I can go see.... For reviews & news, see:

• ResearchBuzz
• Google Blogoscoped
• Scripting News
• John Battelle
• Search Engine Watch

& let's see what happens as Google gets into hosting & not only indexing.

Stop the press. Hold everything... especially if you're one of the merry band of Freshblog readers who use del.icio.us for categories & would like a nice, plump category menu in your sidebar.

Del.icio.us will now let you do it!! They're calling it tagrolls.

Pause... exhale...

John at Library Clips, who is so on top of things that he carries oxygen because of the elevation, has the scoop and thinks of us, the kooky category community, in his post. A tip of the hat to you, Sir!!

This is great news for people who use del.icio.us to file their blog posts within tags, as their blog software may not offer categories…since tags are usually considered more specific than categories, you may use del.icio.us to tag your posts even if you do have blog categories.

I am going to try it forthwith (or as soon as I've blogged about Google Base being live, which it is, btw) & I will let you know what I think... I may even come crawling back with formatting questions. I am happy, of course, to host a discussion on the relative merits of this tool v. other tools for sidebar tag display.

Update: See the sidebar where there's a newly-installed tagroll. How, you ask?

Log in to del.icio.us, and head to http://del.icio.us/help/tagrolls

The formatting seems to be pretty comprehensive. Three sliders and a couple of color wheels. Here's what they do for you:

The "size" option slider controls how many of your tags make it onto the list / into the cloud. The other two sliders control maximum font size & minimum font size, to set the range of the change in size between frequent & occasional tags.

Using the color boxes next to the font sliders, you can also customise the range of colors that transition from frequent to rare tags to suit your template. Simply click the colored box to see the wheel & pick your color... or key the name straight into the box, I guess, if you know your colors that well!!

The "title" box sets the text that goes at the head of the list. I'm considering "All Categories" or something, rather than the default. You can also choose whether to display the del.icio.us icon on your site.

Now to the sorting of the tags themselves. Pretty self-evident, but the "sort" options let you organise your tags alphabetically or by frequency. The "flow" options let you choose either a list or a cloud - whichever format best suits your site. Finally in the "flow" department, there's a checkbox to toggle tag counts on or off. Tag counts are a useful supplement to the font sizes in the list in order to show the relative significance of the tags you're choosing.

When you're done formatting the menu to your liking (and it will preview in real time on the right of the options) simply copy the javascript out of the text-box on the page, and paste it into the right spot in your template. Bingo!!

Many thanks to del.icio.us for this great added feature. This will integrate the tagging / categories system that little bit more, & hopefully make it more attractive / useful / interesting and most importantly, dynamic. Now you can have a sidebar list that will accurately reflect the tags that you're using without constant template changes & 100% republication.

Try the tagroll out. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, see my 3 ways to categorise with del.icio.us, and the other category-related posts in Blogger Hacks - the series.