The Retrospector has taken the 80 submissions to Darren's Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers series, and run the numbers to see what advice is most common and which of the habits are the most widespread. V. interesting.... What is your percentage of effectiveness?
Filed in: blogging
Blogger Hacks, Categories, Tips & Tricks
Another great new way to add inline comments to your blog comes our way from Azer Koculu. The download is a *.rar file, which is not the most accessible format in the universe (witness my inability to open it.... I'll have to go download winrar!) but there's all sorts of goodies wrapped up in the zip file, including a script. Sound familiar? More work for Stephen's jscripts.ning.com, methinks!
Judging by the application on Azer's blog, the comment entry form is neat, & it looks to work great. For other inline comment submission forms, see the Comment Submission Hacks section of Blogger Hacks - The Series.
Filed in: blogtech, webtech, blogger-hacks
Judging by the application on Azer's blog, the comment entry form is neat, & it looks to work great. For other inline comment submission forms, see the Comment Submission Hacks section of Blogger Hacks - The Series.
Filed in: blogtech, webtech, blogger-hacks
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Looks like the latest cool formatting tool to arrive on the scene is the offset text box, which lets you pull out a choice quote, format it for maximum impact, and offset it within your post to catch your readers' eye. I noticed this first a few weeks back with a how-to at Mandarin Design, You can see the hack or one just like it in action on Annie's Blogger University.
Well, Al points out a similar hack, by the ARC90 lab, this one designed to put footnotes in the text boxes instead of choice selections of prose. Very cool, & you can, of course, include any text that you want to, whether footnote or not. Some barriers to getting this to work on blogger, most notably the fact that this hack requires you to host the script, but this how-to ought to get it going, Blogspot style:
As the frosting on the cupcake, at least potentially, there's a very nice show/hide option for sidenotes on the online demo page that doesn't seem to be in the original packet. Is that feature available & I'm just not seeing it? That would be very cool!
Well, Al points out a similar hack, by the ARC90 lab, this one designed to put footnotes in the text boxes instead of choice selections of prose. Very cool, & you can, of course, include any text that you want to, whether footnote or not. Some barriers to getting this to work on blogger, most notably the fact that this hack requires you to host the script, but this how-to ought to get it going, Blogspot style:
- Backup your Blogger template. Copy it & save it as a text file, e-mail it to yourself, whatever. Just please keep a copy that you haven't messed with....
- Download the zip file from the ARC90 site, & save to your hard-drive.
- Extract the contents of the folder, and view the files. There's a webpage, a javascript, and a jpg of a duck... yup, a duck... quack! (This hack's for you, Julie!)
- Check out the index.htm file for a demo of the hack (So that's why there's a picture of a duck in there....) Pretty good, isn't it?
- Go back to the script file. Upload that file to some free web space somewhere. As Stephen points out in the comments, you might like to try his jscripts.ning.com
- Make a note of where you saved the file. You'll need to know in a sec.
- Back to the example webpage. View the source of the webpage, and note the CSS in the head of the template. Copy and paste everything from the opening script tag to the closing style tag into the head of your template.
- Edit the opening line that you pasted (that begins with a script tag) so that the SRC link in that line of code points to the file that you just hosted, like this: src="http://mywebspace/myfolder/arc90_sidenote.js"
- You kept a template backup, right? Good. Save your modified template and republish.
- Write a post, and wrap the text that you want to highlight in span tags with the class "sidenote" and a title attribute. The title text will become the text that appears in the offset sidenote box. To streamline the process of inserting these tags, you might consider saving the code in the Blogger post template, so that it will appear automatically each time you write a post.
- If you want to, you can modify the new CSS in your template head to change the colors, sizes or float positions of the text boxes.
As the frosting on the cupcake, at least potentially, there's a very nice show/hide option for sidenotes on the online demo page that doesn't seem to be in the original packet. Is that feature available & I'm just not seeing it? That would be very cool!
Filed in: blogtech, blogger-hacks
Thursday, May 25, 2006
Philipp Lenssen points out the changes on the Del.icio.us frontpage. Any thoughts? While clearly designed to make things appear more dynamic over there, with a short list of 3 "hot links every hour" appearing at the top of the page, I'm not sure that I like it as much as the long list of random frontpage goodies that you could browse to see what's going on across the whole site. I liked the color coded "how many people have bookmarked what" list, and the longer list of random goodies.
Phillipp also makes a great point that is suggestive of the future of social bookmarking. The list as it stands is tech oriented, and the next great "revolution" in the field has to be the adoption of these technologies by less geeky people, doesn't it? How long 'til there's recipes and horoscopes on the hot list?
Filed in: del.icio.us
Phillipp also makes a great point that is suggestive of the future of social bookmarking. The list as it stands is tech oriented, and the next great "revolution" in the field has to be the adoption of these technologies by less geeky people, doesn't it? How long 'til there's recipes and horoscopes on the hot list?
Filed in: del.icio.us
Here is the latest in my "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should" series of bloghacks. In this one, I build on Adi's excellent Native Blog Search hack (incorporating Singpolyma's rss2json service). The idea is to replicate more-or-less Blogger's Backlink feature, but with a twist.
For starters, it's dynamic, so it will always get the freshest links out of Google's blogsearch. You also get the first paragraph in the tool-tip when you move your mouse over the link. And - here's the recursive bit - when you click the ~> at the end of each backlink, it will run off to fetch the backlinks for that backlink and insert it amongst the others as a nested list. This can continue ad infinitum as readers explore the web of backlinks (back-backlinks? meta-backlinks? ancestor-posts?) to your blog.
My Speccy blog isn't particularly well-connected, but if you jump off from this post, scroll half way down the sidebar and look for "Posts that link here". Then, click on "Shock! AFL ..." link, you'll get a taste for what's going on.
If you'd like to get this happening on your own blog, then add this to your header:
Then put this in your sidebar or wherever makes sense for you:
Note that I suggest wrapping both parts in Blogger's ItemPage tags, since you probably don't want to see this on archive and main pages.
At the moment, I'm using ~> to indicate "there may be more backlinks ... go on, give it a click!" and ] indicates "no, I've looked and this is a dead end". If anyone can suggest more natural/obvious symbols/icons to use, I'd love to hear from you.
Source code is viewable here. I've just modified it to use the
So is the world ready for recursive backlinks? Probably not. But still, there's gotta be plenty of other uses we can put this integrated search hack to work on.
Filed in: google, blogtech, search, blogger-hacks, backlinks
For starters, it's dynamic, so it will always get the freshest links out of Google's blogsearch. You also get the first paragraph in the tool-tip when you move your mouse over the link. And - here's the recursive bit - when you click the ~> at the end of each backlink, it will run off to fetch the backlinks for that backlink and insert it amongst the others as a nested list. This can continue ad infinitum as readers explore the web of backlinks (back-backlinks? meta-backlinks? ancestor-posts?) to your blog.
My Speccy blog isn't particularly well-connected, but if you jump off from this post, scroll half way down the sidebar and look for "Posts that link here". Then, click on "Shock! AFL ..." link, you'll get a taste for what's going on.
If you'd like to get this happening on your own blog, then add this to your header:
<ItemPage><script type="text/javascript" src="http://ghill.customer.netspace.net.au/backlinker/backlinker.js">
</script></ItemPage>Then put this in your sidebar or wherever makes sense for you:
<ItemPage><h2 class="sidebar-title">Posts That Link Here</h2>
<div id="backlinks">
No backlinks found.
</div>
<script type="text/javascript">
backlinker();
</script></ItemPage>Note that I suggest wrapping both parts in Blogger's ItemPage tags, since you probably don't want to see this on archive and main pages.
At the moment, I'm using ~> to indicate "there may be more backlinks ... go on, give it a click!" and ] indicates "no, I've looked and this is a dead end". If anyone can suggest more natural/obvious symbols/icons to use, I'd love to hear from you.
Source code is viewable here. I've just modified it to use the
window.location.href as the initial search query, and prettied up the output as a (nestable) unordered list. Oh, plus some housekeeping around retaining/swapping elements around.So is the world ready for recursive backlinks? Probably not. But still, there's gotta be plenty of other uses we can put this integrated search hack to work on.
Filed in: google, blogtech, search, blogger-hacks, backlinks
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Not content with blogging my comments from other folks' blogs, I'm blogging my comments from my own blog. Ron has added Freshtags to his blog, & has asked for a bit more info about the option for an archive menu with post count. Here's the (hopefully comprehensive) scoop:
This hack uses a bookmarklet and menu combo that allows you to bookmark your archive pages on del.icio.us with a special tag, and a post count. That way you can pull these pages out of del.icio.us and into a sidebar menu that includes a post count & gives your readers a sense of how much stuff you're writing & what's happening on your blog.
To get it working, you need to install Freshtags, & add the code for the archive menu into your sidebar, at whatever point you'd like the menu to appear. You can keep the blogger menu going too, if you like, as I do here for some unknown reason!
After installing the menu, drag the archiving bookmarklet from the bottom of the Freshtags Build Page onto the links bar of your browser. Edit the bookmarklet (by right-clicking & selecting properties)
1. Change the title if you'd like
2. Replace both instances of the word "Vent" in the location field with the name of your blog, so that the bookmarklet reads
...'&description=blogname: '+tidy(document.title)+'&tags=blogname_archive&extended...
Now you're all set for a mammoth session of archive bookmarking.
Visit each archive page in turn. Count your posts, and select the bookmarklet to bookmark them to del.icio.us & add a post count. You'll be prompted to log in to del.icio.us if you haven't already, & asked to enter the post count for the month on a pop-up form. When you're done, the menu will list all of your archive pages with a post count. Check it out on the sidebar here....
As an additional incentive, this archive hack plays very nicely with the Blog Navigator, as long as you bookmark your archive page to del.icio.us at the beginning of the new month with a bogus post count, and then go back & correct the count at the end of the month.
If you're new to Freshtags, check out our introduction to the service.
Filed in: freshtags, blogtech, webtech, blogger-hacks, del.icio.us
This hack uses a bookmarklet and menu combo that allows you to bookmark your archive pages on del.icio.us with a special tag, and a post count. That way you can pull these pages out of del.icio.us and into a sidebar menu that includes a post count & gives your readers a sense of how much stuff you're writing & what's happening on your blog.
To get it working, you need to install Freshtags, & add the code for the archive menu into your sidebar, at whatever point you'd like the menu to appear. You can keep the blogger menu going too, if you like, as I do here for some unknown reason!
After installing the menu, drag the archiving bookmarklet from the bottom of the Freshtags Build Page onto the links bar of your browser. Edit the bookmarklet (by right-clicking & selecting properties)
1. Change the title if you'd like
2. Replace both instances of the word "Vent" in the location field with the name of your blog, so that the bookmarklet reads
...'&description=blogname: '+tidy(document.title)+'&tags=blogname_archive&extended...
Now you're all set for a mammoth session of archive bookmarking.
Visit each archive page in turn. Count your posts, and select the bookmarklet to bookmark them to del.icio.us & add a post count. You'll be prompted to log in to del.icio.us if you haven't already, & asked to enter the post count for the month on a pop-up form. When you're done, the menu will list all of your archive pages with a post count. Check it out on the sidebar here....
As an additional incentive, this archive hack plays very nicely with the Blog Navigator, as long as you bookmark your archive page to del.icio.us at the beginning of the new month with a bogus post count, and then go back & correct the count at the end of the month.
If you're new to Freshtags, check out our introduction to the service.
Filed in: freshtags, blogtech, webtech, blogger-hacks, del.icio.us
As Tags become widespread and well-used, is it time for a dedicated and feature rich tag-site designed especially for bloggers? John T thinks so, and is chasing up the possibilities. He's shooting for auto-detection like Technorati, with an exportable tag cloud like Del.icio.us, and a slick appearance, perhaps customiseable so that it would match your template. So what would this service look like, and what would we need it to do? Perhaps it could have
Such a service could also become a data source for Freshtags, and for Tag Overlay, & provide a central location for tags to become truly interactive features of your blog, rather than set-aside search words.
Filed in: blogtech technorati tags tagging blogger del.icio.us
- The ability to generate tags w/ custom URL's that were visible in all other tag search services.
- Automatic aggregation, & no need to bookmark
- Personal accounts for subscriptions to certain tags / users
- An exportable and custom-formattable sidebar tag cloud
- Feeds for tags, and combos of tags
- Output that shows both your blog content and the wider topical content in the blogosphere
Such a service could also become a data source for Freshtags, and for Tag Overlay, & provide a central location for tags to become truly interactive features of your blog, rather than set-aside search words.
Filed in: blogtech technorati tags tagging blogger del.icio.us
Great post by Denise that comes via Full Circle. Discussion of the blogroll as a feature of the blog, and 5 questions about the role of your 'roll. Here's my 10 cents:
2) what do you hope to gain or provide by having a blogroll and is that working for you?
I think at this point that a blogroll is a statement of community... Either "I am one of these people" or "I'd really like to be one of these people..." Your blogroll is a statement of the community that you see your blog as being part of. Is it working? Who knows! Is it even a significant part of the statement? Who knows. I imagine that post content and sources weigh more heavily on the minds of blog readers at this point than blogrollage, but being on a blogroll is still a weightier link in terms of search results, and is one of the good things you can do for the sites that you like.
Other options for showing which community you belong to? Provide a link to a public feed digest, and a link to an OPML file of subs. That way, anyone who wants to can plug in to the community that you're sharing ideas with. If the two originate in the same place, the OPML would update with the subs, and so the two would stay synchronised.
5) you care about community and providing link love, I know you do, so how can you let go of that blogroll and still provide the love?
Can engines still see drop-down links? The love is important, and blogroll-love appears on every page of your site and so is mightily fortified with Google juice. I have the idea, though, that OPML and feedreaders are on the way to making the blogroll a cosmetic rather than functional part of your blog.
So, question 6... How can we rehab the blogroll to bring it to front & center once again? (& should we?)
Filed in: blogroll blogging
1) why do you have a blogroll?
2) what do you hope to gain or provide by having a blogroll and is that working for you?
I think at this point that a blogroll is a statement of community... Either "I am one of these people" or "I'd really like to be one of these people..." Your blogroll is a statement of the community that you see your blog as being part of. Is it working? Who knows! Is it even a significant part of the statement? Who knows. I imagine that post content and sources weigh more heavily on the minds of blog readers at this point than blogrollage, but being on a blogroll is still a weightier link in terms of search results, and is one of the good things you can do for the sites that you like.
3) why are you thinking about doing away with it?
4) what would you do instead? (if anything)
Other options for showing which community you belong to? Provide a link to a public feed digest, and a link to an OPML file of subs. That way, anyone who wants to can plug in to the community that you're sharing ideas with. If the two originate in the same place, the OPML would update with the subs, and so the two would stay synchronised.
5) you care about community and providing link love, I know you do, so how can you let go of that blogroll and still provide the love?
Can engines still see drop-down links? The love is important, and blogroll-love appears on every page of your site and so is mightily fortified with Google juice. I have the idea, though, that OPML and feedreaders are on the way to making the blogroll a cosmetic rather than functional part of your blog.
So, question 6... How can we rehab the blogroll to bring it to front & center once again? (& should we?)
Filed in: blogroll blogging
This is the question posed by Marshall Kirkpatrick. Marshall wonders whether the features added by the buttons are worth their aesthetic downside. The great stuff is in the comments, where he goes on to
Filed in: blogging blogtech
wonder whether all of these “easy connection” tools are just little levers that only some people will use as part of a blog’s larger connection to the world? Hmmm…My response is in a comment over there... but a lil' repost never killed anyone. Part of my hack-addiction (and part of what is so great about blogs in general) is that they make information as interactive, adaptable and accessible as possible.... moving beyond the book, if you like. So to my comment on Marshall's blog:
the more levers, the more connections… Easy sub buttons for feeds, easy bookmark links like these, comments, trackbacks, one-click backlinks, these are all tools that integrate a site more tightly into the conversation… The more of these tools you have, the easier it is for the individual reader to make use of the information that you provide in a way that makes sense to them. More levers, I say!Different readers want to do different stuff with your content. Some want it delivered to their e-mail, others to a reader, & still others want to tag it & stick it on del.icio.us so that they can come back to it later. Some want to see how authoritative it is by checking out the backlinks. Some are moved to respond to it directly with a comment, or to trackback their reaction from their own blog. None of these things are easy (or possible) with a printed page. Bloggy "levers" open up your content to different users and spread your thoughts as widely as possible. To echo myself... More levers!
Filed in: blogging blogtech
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
3Spots keeps on top of the bookmark buttons issue, presenting a great new tool for generating your button code which will also keep that code in a bookmarklet for you, so that you can retrieve it & paste easily. There's also a link to a show/hide hack for the buttons. Now that keeps your template tidy! Excellent.
Filed in: tags tagging blogtech
Filed in: tags tagging blogtech
If you change your URL, or move to WP even, DON'T DELETE YOUR OLD BLOG! Leave it there for the links, and the goodness, and the memories of the old times, and so that your subscribers don't have to put up with sploggers poaching your URL and delivering their spam-infested crapulousness to your feedreader.
There were some good blogger hacks over there... I guess they're gone now, replaced w/ advertisements for assorted herbal remedies and quackery. At least now we know where to go for Viagra...
Perhaps this calls for a "migration" how-to?
Filed in: blogtech blogger
There were some good blogger hacks over there... I guess they're gone now, replaced w/ advertisements for assorted herbal remedies and quackery. At least now we know where to go for Viagra...
Perhaps this calls for a "migration" how-to?
Filed in: blogtech blogger
Anyone else notice a change in Feedburner stats over the weekend? Both my comment feed and post feed are up by 100 subs since Friday, which is v. interesting. Post feed only, & I would have thought I'd had a bump from a big inbound or something... but both together can only be a change in the reporting @ Feedburner, can't it?
or is there a nefarious splog deployment occurring?
Filed in: freshblog feedburner feeds
or is there a nefarious splog deployment occurring?
Filed in: freshblog feedburner feeds
Monday, May 22, 2006
Visit The Last Word and Bloggeratto to check out Aditya's excellent output options for the del.icio.us "tags as categories" blogger hack. It's all asynchronous, & so loads up after your page, & isn't a drag on the whole blog. Very nice indeed, especially the way that it is set up there, w/ a pop-up sidebar and a table of post titles that appears at the top of the main frame. This is a great use of space on the page, & allows for a post preview to be included in the category search results. Excellent.
Filed in: blogtech, webtech, categories, blogger-hacks, del.icio.us,
Filed in: blogtech, webtech, categories, blogger-hacks, del.icio.us,
More good stuff at Library Clips, this time some thoughts about courtesy, notification and what John is calling "homepage trackback..." the ability to "push" a post to a reader whom you know will be interested in the content.
If you've talked about an issue of interest to a blogger, but you don't have a post to ping, what should you do? Blogger has an "e-mail this post" feature, which will let you e-mail this post (duh!) to anyone who's interested. This requires that you've got the address of the person, some sense that you'll get past their spam filter, and that you can find the e-mail icon on your blog.... It's there somewhere....
John explores other ways of doing this... Interesting to think of the blogosphere as "pull" vs. "push," and to address new ways of "pushing" content.
Filed in: blogging blogtech
If you've talked about an issue of interest to a blogger, but you don't have a post to ping, what should you do? Blogger has an "e-mail this post" feature, which will let you e-mail this post (duh!) to anyone who's interested. This requires that you've got the address of the person, some sense that you'll get past their spam filter, and that you can find the e-mail icon on your blog.... It's there somewhere....
John explores other ways of doing this... Interesting to think of the blogosphere as "pull" vs. "push," and to address new ways of "pushing" content.
Filed in: blogging blogtech
Darren @ Problogger has set up a "group writing project" on the habits of effective bloggers. You let him know you've written a post, & he'll link to it this week. An interesting way to collect the wisdom of the blogosphere & to share the love / influence. I'm trying to decide on a definition of "effective" that will justify a contribution!
Update: I think I was getting at effective blogging with my list from last November, so I submitted that!
Filed in: blogging
Update: I think I was getting at effective blogging with my list from last November, so I submitted that!
Filed in: blogging
Saturday, May 20, 2006
John T @ Library Clips revisits the Del.icio.us network page to see that
To see the network of a del.icio.us user, simply log in, view the user's bookmarks at
http://del.icio.us/username
then select "view network" from the greyed-out bar at the top of the page.
How long 'til Technorati does the same thing & lets you see a list of the users who have "favorited" your blog?
Filed in: technorati, blogtech, del.ici.ous
if you go to "your network", you will see a section on the sidebar called "your fans". These are people who have you in their network (you can set your network to private, so no-one can see which users you subscribe to).Great use of the network feature! People who are interested in your stuff will be interested in other, similar stuff that is bookmarked by other people, & so will lead you to new resources.
To see the network of a del.icio.us user, simply log in, view the user's bookmarks at
http://del.icio.us/username
then select "view network" from the greyed-out bar at the top of the page.
How long 'til Technorati does the same thing & lets you see a list of the users who have "favorited" your blog?
Filed in: technorati, blogtech, del.ici.ous
A reader e-mails to ask how to hack the blogger comments code to make the post count grammatically correct... Comments (0), Comment (1), Comments (2), that sort of deal. Now, I'm pretty sure I've seen this somewhere before, but I can't recall where, which is why I'm opening the floor & hoping you'll remind me!
Filed in: blogger blogspot blogtech comments blogger-hacks
Filed in: blogger blogspot blogtech comments blogger-hacks
Another way to track the status & traffic of your blog comes our way from Wholinked.com. This is a neat little sidebar widget that queries search engines for your most recent inbound links and outputs them in a list. The service is currently free, although the "what's this?" link at the bottom of the box flashes an ad when you select it. For a review of the service, (and an interesting "marketing" challenge w/ a cash prize attached) see Technology Evangelist. Two ways to look at this, of course.... it tells you who linked to you, and tells your readers how authoritative you are based on how authoritative your inbounds are, but it also serves as an automatic backlink on your site for anyone who links in, including those ever creative "marketers"...
Filed in: inbounds cosmos blogtech webtech
Filed in: inbounds cosmos blogtech webtech
Over at The Last Word, Aditya has come up with a great blog-search hack that displays the search results in your template. As regular readers know, one of the things that adds value to a hack & makes it worth implementing is the nature of the output. Are you taken offsite / to a 3rd party to see search results, category lists &c, or can you pull those goodies back into your sidebar (or a fake post) for maximum integration and slick-looking professionalism?
So... This hack takes Google Blog Search results, converts them to a JSON feed and lets you format them any way that you please on your blog. Cool. The code is alll available at The Last Word. Once again, there's instructions on wrapping the inserts in rarely-used tags so that the special parts of the template are easily seen by the script. The hack is also working wonderfully over there in the sidebar, so you can test it before you install it!!
Filed in: google search blogsearch blogtech blogger-hacks
So... This hack takes Google Blog Search results, converts them to a JSON feed and lets you format them any way that you please on your blog. Cool. The code is alll available at The Last Word. Once again, there's instructions on wrapping the inserts in rarely-used tags so that the special parts of the template are easily seen by the script. The hack is also working wonderfully over there in the sidebar, so you can test it before you install it!!
Filed in: google search blogsearch blogtech blogger-hacks
Friday, May 19, 2006
Hot on the heels of Singpolyma's Tagging Thesaurus project comes new taggy goodness in the form of a webservice from knallgrau, boldly dubbed tagthe.net. (These guys are seriously ambi.tio.us)
The algorithms is far from perfect, but it's exciting enough to warrant attention from bloghackers and tagerati everywhere. They send results back as an XML document, which is fine for grownups. Those of us splashing about in the shallow end need a JSON(P) feed. Impressively, within 8 hours of my polite enquiry, they had a documented JSON feed up and running. That's what I call agile development!
This service could be a boon for people tackling the arduous task of retro-fitting tags to their blogs. It also has applications in helping you choose which which tags to apply with your social bookmarking buttons.
Of course, by way of quid pro quo, I've provided a version of my earlier TagOverlay experiment that uses tagthe.net as the source for the overlaid tags. It's somewhat stripped-down, in that it doesn't incorporate tag counts and the pop-up box thingy has been dropped since I'm still figuring out what that should do. Anyway, check it out (give it a click):
TagOverlay (tagthe.net)
Why not give it a roadtest too? Just drag this link onto your browser's toolbar and you'll have a handy taghunting bookmarklet to aid websurfing.
Here's the human-readable source.
For completeness, I've thrown together another version of the above, this time instead of tagthe.net (for generic tags) or del.icio.us (for your/someone else's tags), it just trawls through the current page looking for rel="tag" in the links:
TagOverlay (rel="tag")
Hardly rocket science, but it seems to be effective in picking up the publisher's tags. (And, as usual, the human-readable source is here.)
So, we've got no end of methods for finding tags on the page. If you've got any bright ideas about what to do with them, please share on the earlier post. We'd love to hear your brainwave, wishlist or taggy fantasies!
Filed in: tags, webtech, blogger-hacks, tagthe.net, bookmarking, bookmarklets
This is a simple webservice that helps you in tagging textual content on and off the web. There are two ways of using it:
1. by simply pasting a URL or a text in the fields below or uploading a file
2. by using the REST API
tagthe.net then returns a set of tags based on the textual content you specified.
The algorithms is far from perfect, but it's exciting enough to warrant attention from bloghackers and tagerati everywhere. They send results back as an XML document, which is fine for grownups. Those of us splashing about in the shallow end need a JSON(P) feed. Impressively, within 8 hours of my polite enquiry, they had a documented JSON feed up and running. That's what I call agile development!
This service could be a boon for people tackling the arduous task of retro-fitting tags to their blogs. It also has applications in helping you choose which which tags to apply with your social bookmarking buttons.
Of course, by way of quid pro quo, I've provided a version of my earlier TagOverlay experiment that uses tagthe.net as the source for the overlaid tags. It's somewhat stripped-down, in that it doesn't incorporate tag counts and the pop-up box thingy has been dropped since I'm still figuring out what that should do. Anyway, check it out (give it a click):
TagOverlay (tagthe.net)
Why not give it a roadtest too? Just drag this link onto your browser's toolbar and you'll have a handy taghunting bookmarklet to aid websurfing.
Here's the human-readable source.
For completeness, I've thrown together another version of the above, this time instead of tagthe.net (for generic tags) or del.icio.us (for your/someone else's tags), it just trawls through the current page looking for rel="tag" in the links:
TagOverlay (rel="tag")
Hardly rocket science, but it seems to be effective in picking up the publisher's tags. (And, as usual, the human-readable source is here.)
So, we've got no end of methods for finding tags on the page. If you've got any bright ideas about what to do with them, please share on the earlier post. We'd love to hear your brainwave, wishlist or taggy fantasies!
Filed in: tags, webtech, blogger-hacks, tagthe.net, bookmarking, bookmarklets
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
In a move that pushes last week's discussion of tag-passing to the next level, Stephen has come up with Tagging, a great new Ning application to enable the consolidation of similar tags. Tagging has an API that will enable applications to poll for "virtually synonymous" tags, and then output a broader range of results based on the accessed pool of synonyms and not just the individually searched tag. Stephen explains:
Filed in: tags, webtech, folksonomy, tagging
Virtually synonymous means that two tags mean the same thing in practise. Variant spellings (web2.0 and web20, or colour and color) and plurals (hack and hacks) are usually virtually synonymous. Siblings are not virtually synonymous (cars and trucks).Very cool. This might allow Freshtags to pull synonymous content from multiple blogs, or enable TagOverlay to overlay synonyms as well as tags onto the site you're processing, & that's only the beginning. Great work!
Filed in: tags, webtech, folksonomy, tagging
Leveraging the information that passes through their hands in an interesting new way (which came to my attention via Micropersuasion) Technorati have started representing the info about your blog on an index card. (Kinja plaques, anyone?) Interesting compound view of relevant info, w/ the innovation that you can see how many people have "favorited" your blog. Another metric to start losing weight / sleep / hair over! Great to have all the goodies on one page! Consolidation is surely the future of the blog-tracker market, & the one-stop stats page seems to be the latest frontier in the battle....
Update: There's a bookmarklet in the comments at Micropersuasion that will open the index card for the blog that you're reading... Cool!
Filed in: technorati tags blogging blogtech
Update: There's a bookmarklet in the comments at Micropersuasion that will open the index card for the blog that you're reading... Cool!
Filed in: technorati tags blogging blogtech
Thursday, May 11, 2006
Emphasising mobility, Stowe Boyd blogs on the death of the browser, and has good stuff to say:
Some of these questions may be answered in this Oxford University webcast lecture that I (coincidentally) saw today on Resource Shelf.
Filed in: webtech google web2.0
The browser will explode into a thousand fragments, will spawn a thousand specialized offspring. They will share common DNA, and many of the components will remain common, but I predict a huge surge in this form of innovation, especially as we move toward mobile, ubiquitous, handheld, always on computing. Like the dinosaurs, the browser will apparently become extinct, but in fact will live on, as in the form of modern day birds, a thousand times lighter, faster, and smaller than their lumbering ancestors....What will this look like? What sort of files will we store? Where will we keep them, and how will we view them? Is universal wi-fi required to make this leap fully functional? I'm thinking of all the new Google products that bridge the gap between the hard-drive and the web. Are there benefits of accessing information through a single portal (browser) ? What are the key benefits of fully interactive "every application online all the time" computing? Are we also talking about signal integration here? Tivo / TV On-Demand? Is this the world of the refrigerator that can tell when you're low on milk & automatically order some more? Interesting & provocative piece. For sci-fi hi-tech we first have to abandon the browser and network all of our apps...
Some of these questions may be answered in this Oxford University webcast lecture that I (coincidentally) saw today on Resource Shelf.
Filed in: webtech google web2.0
Monday, May 08, 2006
Have found the time (despite having many other things that ought to have been done) to throw out my old "Sticky Posts" sidebar box, and come back with the rockin' dynamic Freshtags "Highlights" post-title list. The sidebar now lists what I consider to be the 15 most critical Freshblog posts by default. Cool! More to come too, I think...
Filed in: tags, webtech, freshtags, freshblog
Filed in: tags, webtech, freshtags, freshblog