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Tagging Added
Posted November 25, 2005 – 3:23 pm by Yakov Shafranovich in WebsiteAfter using tagging in other services (Flickr, Technorati, etc.) I finally got around to adding tagging to this blog. I used the recently released Tags plugin developed by MovableType. It uses the “Keywords” section of the MT template to enter tags, and upon entry it adds them to the “Tags” category. IYou can see the tags for each post right above the “posted by” line and a list of all the tags on this blog on the right side (below the categories list). However, there were several other things which I wanted to do with tags as well and here I will provide a short summary of what I did:
1. Display the List of Tags Separatly from Categories.
I have a list of main top level categories and now tags. Since MT treats tags as regular categories, they cluttered up the list. So instead what I did is omitted them from the “Categories” listing and created a separate “Tags” list. In order to exclude the tags from the category listing, I used the following piece of code:
<MTCategories><MTIfIsDescendant parent="Tags"><MTElse>
...
And when doing the tags listing, I did the opposite:
<MTCategories><MTIfIsDescendant parent="Tags">
...
Of course, I would rather have a tagcloud, but so far I haven’t been sucessful in making one.
2. Adding relevant del.icio.us and Flickr content.
For the individual category pages, I added del.icio.us and Flickr links for content with the same tags by using the following two snippets of code:
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://del.icio.us/feeds/js/netwizard/<$MTArchiveTitle$>“>
</script> <script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://www.flickr.com/badge_code_v2.gne?show_name=1&count=5&display=latest
&size=t&layout=v&source=user_tag
&user=42361858%40N00&tag=<$MTArchiveTitle$>“>
</script>
3. Better ads.For category pages ONLY, I also changed the ads by removing Google AdSense and adding Amazon’s Associates links. Specifically, I added the “books” search linked to the name of the category/tag it appears on. I used the code provided by Amazon for putting in two IFRAMES, substituting the keywords in the search section for the name of the category using the MTArchiveName tag. I also removed all Google Adsense code including the referal buttons. Suprisengly, the ads are MUCH more relevant than Google’s ever were (more info in the next post.
You can see the finished product by going to the rss tag page.
P.S. Technorati still doesn’t pick up the tags.
UPDATE: After a comment left by David Sifry (yes, the CEO of Technorati), the problem seems to be that the tag pages themselves have to point to something like “…/tags/tagname” as explained by this page (why the main Technorati Tags page doesn’t mention this, I don’t know). However, since I didn’t want to muck around with Movable Type’s custom archive templates to generate the program “/tags/tagname” archives, I just used mod_rewrite:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^tags/(.*) /blog/archives/cat_$1.html [R]
UPDATE #2: Even with suggestions from David Sifry, something still doesn’t work. I now suspect that the real culprit maybe the Feedburner feed, especially since some people in the FB forums have been complaining. I have added an rewrite rule to serve the original atom feed to the technorati bot while redirecting everyone else to FB.
UPDATE #3: Tags now works and have been picked up by Technorati!
Tags: movable type, tagging, technorati —
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One Response to “Tagging Added”
Technorati isn’t picking up your tag links because they aren’t following the spec, as defined here:
http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag
May I suggest that you change your URL structure so that your tag URLs are not:
(Note that I’ve replaced greater than and less than signs with ‘[' and ']‘ so you can see this)
[a href="http://www.shaftek.org/blog/archives/cat_blogging.html"]blogging[/a]
but instead are:
[a href="http://www.shaftek.org/blog/archives/blogging"]blogging[/a]
to conform with the spec. That way Technorati will definitely index your tags correctly…
Hope that helps!
Dave
By David Sifry on Nov 25, 2005