FreshTags users who jumped ship early to the new Blogger platform have cause to rejoice: Singpolyma has coded up a version that supports the new environment! (Instructions and explanation on his post.) Kudos and praise to Singpolyma for this important breakthrough.

The new release is based on his earlier FreshTags version and integrates the tags and posts as sidebar widgets. The focus is on supporting the long-standing technique of tag passing between blogs. This is where readers select tags on one blog, follow a link to another and find that the same tag is already selected on this new page.

Singpolyma has also finally achieved what so many have clamoured for, but none has seen in Blogger: full text of tagged posts on a single page. That is, when a reader selects a tag (say, "folksonomy"), all posts with that tag are listed in full on the same page. There have been various work-arounds whereby summary text is provided using a page from the distant past, but this uses the new label search feature in Blogger Beta. As long as your tags in Delicious sync with your Blogger labels, the trick is flawless.

Under the hood, we're also seeing the first instantiation of important changes to the way FreshTags variants store, access and share configuration information. This new standard will be further developed and support a wider-range of future applications, particularly around multiple FreshTags-enabled widgets on the page.

With Singpolyma's recent development of Beta-friendly "FreshRolls" (a "tag-aware" extension to Singpolyma's Wrinks blogroll/blogring app), we're seeing a distinct ramp-up in FreshTags development. To keep that momentum going, if you're a FreshTags user still on Blogger Classic and keen to help try out some new presentation styles (eg asynchronous tag clouds and nested post titles), please leave a note and I'll see what we can do.

Filed in: freshtags, singpolyma, wrink, webtech