Blogger Hacks, Categories, Tips & Tricks

Sunday, February 19, 2006
Implementing Labelr
After blogging about the service & getting some good buzz last week, I have had the chance to implement Labelr on Freshblog. The effects can't be fully explored today because the service is down for enhancement. Full road-tests will commence when Amit's improvements are complete. I'm not formatting the results page correctly at the moment, but I'm working on it. (All support welcome!)

Have tried to be smart with my categories.... Blogger Hacks for specific posts dealing with add-ons to your blogger template, Blogtech for more general / generic blog technology material, and Webtech for non-blog related interweb technology posts. I may add more labels, we'll see, but I vow to be neater than I have been w/ my tags....

Plan to continue w/ Technorati & Del.icio.us combo tagging, and of course with Freshtags, but use Labelr for limited "internal" categories, with in-blog results display.

There are several features of Labelr that are v. powerful, imaginative and remarkably well integrated into blogger.
  • Labels are selected using an "admin console" that opens in the footer of each blogger post when a bookmarklet is selected.
  • Label search results are displayed in a "fake post" that looks identical to your blog's template.
  • Each label has an RSS feed. Readers can subscribe to just one of your labels.
As Athique comments, the only significant upgrade / modification would be to allow labelling / category selection prior to publication, instead of afterwards. The admin console, though, is a stroke of genius. It is on your page, in your blog, (rather than in a seperate window) and enables category selection w/ simple clicks.

Am very interested to explore the opportunities for tie-ins between Labelr and Freshtags.

Filed in: , , , , ,
Posted at 3:06 PM by John.
3 Comments:
<    >
Blogger Mario said...
I recently implementing something similar to Labelr but 50% Blogger stuff, 50% delicious, but in fact Amit Upadhyay, inspired me!!

Saludos
Mario

<    >
Blogger Gabe said...
Greg,

I wanted to comment on a comment you left on Taher's sight linked here:

http://www.blogger.com/publish-comment.do?blogID=21033509&postID=113745931183793118&r=ok

I posted the dialogue below to his site, but I wanted to pass it to you as well:

Here's why I don't like the delicious approach as a novice blogger. First, as Taher states, using delicious takes you away from the main blogger page. Second, you have to do some editing to each post you make such that it works....yuck. So far, Taher's method is one step better. However, both fail on this account (Taher's method still goes away from your specific blog to the general Blogger search site). I'd love to have categories keep the reader right in my blog. Unfortunately for Taher's method (and I realize this may be the only way to do it) I don't like having to prefix my entries with the category name either. It would be great if you could simply write your post, click what category you want it in and your done. I'd love the category function to be seamless. The delicious method just seems way to tricky since you have to manually tag every post using manual coding. For someone like me who wants only two or three catergories forming what I envision as a real "multiblog", it needs to be much easier. I feel I jumped the gun by going with blogger, if wordpress does this automatically. And, as so many have pointed out, this really is the only way to go if you want to blog a lot. Some of the best formats are www.tompeters.com or www.radicalcareering.com/hogblog/index.php. I'd love for categories to be like that.

As a side, I've asked for Amit's labelr application because it sounds as if it might be just what I describe above. My fingers are crossed. Otherwise, wordpress here I come (I'm not implicating you here. I just think the blogger folks are idiotic for not including something so basic.)

-Gabe

<    >
Blogger Greg said...
Hi Gabe,

Let me preface my remarks by saying that I'm in favour of having available a multitude of blog category methods, including search engines (like Taher's), tagging (FreshTags), hosted feeds (Labelr) and built-in (Wordpress). They each have strengths and weaknesses. You know, let a hundred flowers bloom etc.

(The only proviso is that I would not recommend any method that requires all the posts to be on the front page due to scalability and load issues. Ditto for methods that requires maintaining multiple near-identical blogs for each category.)

That said, I think there are some persistent misunderstandings of the tagging method for categories being promulgated.

Firstly, it does NOT have to take your readers to delicious. You can have your tags/categories point to internal links. This has been the case for at least four months now, since Marc Morales' sidebar hack.

Secondly, the inclusion of tags on each post has been entirely automated by methods such as Johan's greasemonkey script. For many readers, tags would be included anyway to gain visibilty in technorati.

Please reconsider the tagging method - it is seamless and provides you with benefits that come from getting your blog into a wider social context.

-Greg


eXTReMe Tracker