Wednesday, March 26, 2008
I was very happy to see that the WordPress developers included the ability to “tag” posts. For a long time I’ve been using my own bastardized version of Bunny’s Technorati Tags to add tags to this site. A few days ago I decided to bite the bullet and convert to using the tag system that is now baked into this CMS.
It’s a much more “visitor friendly” implementation of tagging …
Here’s my only problem: The standard WordPress tagging engine is designed so that clicking a tag on a post displays an archives page with all of the other posts tagged with that tag. (Confused yet?) I don’t like that. One reason I don’t like that is because I have not yet managed to transfer all of my tags from the old system to the new, so lots and lots of my posts have no tags. That means if you click a tag for “ovulating kleptomaniac”, for example, you’re not going to get any results. So I have hornswaggled the code a bit to make it so that on this site the tags link to search results for that tag instead. I think it’s a much more “visitor friendly” implementation of tagging.
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Monday, December 11, 2006
According to the tag help page at Technorati, all you have to do to have their system “find” your tags is (1) add a rel=”tag” parameter to your links and (2) make sure those links end with the word you are tagging (e.g. something.com/tag). The first part is simple. The second part is easy, but not very practical. More importantly, though, is the fact that neither of these seem to actually work. As far as I can tell Technorati does not read your entire post and strip any tags it finds. In fact it seems that Technorati only reads your RSS and analyzes that to determine how to tag your posts. That’s okay, though, because I can tell you how to convert your WordPress tags into rss category nodes so that Technorati indexes them.
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Thursday, December 7, 2006
A little while ago I cobbled together a tagging system here on the site. The tags appear at the bottom of each post and you can use them to find related content. For some reason, though, they aren’t being caught by Technorati. I’m pretty sure I followed their specs exactly, but no dice. Every time I checked, the only tags that would display for a post in their summary were the categories associated with an entry.
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Wednesday, October 4, 2006
Tags! They’re everywhere! It seems like every site on the ‘net is adding tagging now. Tag clouds — ridiculous, pointless, and annoying — are not the reason. Tagging is a good way to get into Technorati and a good way to get more traffic to your site. It’s a nifty way to organize your posts and to help your readers find what they want on your site. Is it the wave of the future? I don’t know. I don’t think so. Several of the early adopters are now saying that they are useless, and the search engines seemed to be doing a fair job of indexing blogs long before people got tag-happy. But it’s not exactly terribly painful to add this functionality to your site — it only took me about a half hour, so how hard could it be? Plus you’ve got me to explain it all to you.
This how-to assumes that you’re using WordPress to manage your blog. If you are using something else — blogger, MovableType, etc. — then you’ll have to look somewhere else. Technorati is a good place to start.
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Wednesday, September 20, 2006
I have finally updated two of my WordPress hack tutorials so that they are compliant with v. 2.04.
The first one — DropCaps — allows you to put that nifty “dropcap” into a post. This post begins with a dropcap I.
The second one — Amazon Tags — adds two new buttons to your editing screen. They allow you to link directly to an Amazon item by its ASIN or to add a link to an Amazon search.
The second one includes a link to a zipped copy. You can just extract quicktags.js into your wp-includes/js folder and the images into your wp-images folder and you’re set.
Happy WordPress modding!
Friday, March 11, 2005
I wanted to add nifty little Amazon links to my posting window … so I did. Grab my zipped version of quicktags.js and you can, too. This is the javascript file that builds the row of buttons above your posting window (e.g. str, em, del, etc.) My version adds two buttons: one for quick-linking to an item at Amazon via its ASIN and one for quick-linking to an Amazon search.
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