A Consuming Experience

Blogosphere search engine Technorati helped pioneer tags (intro to Technorati tags). But they've taken their time introducing a tool for ordinary users to display tag clouds easily on their blogs. Well, we won't have to wait much longer, hopefully. UPDATE 11 April: now officially launched, see this post.

In working on a form (strictly, debugging my attempt at a form!) for New Blogger users to add the Technorati blog authority widget to their blogs with a couple of clicks, Kirk noticed that the underlying Javascript file used by Technorati for their widget had some references to tagclouds.

So, clearly, you'll soon be able to show clouds just for the top Technorati tags specific to your blog (which they're calling "Blog Top Tags"), rather than all tags used by everyone. But Technorati haven't announced this officially yet, e.g. via their blog (UPDATE 11 April: now officially launched, see this post.) Still, the ever clever Kirk has worked out from their script how you can get a tagcloud for your own blog, based on tags picked up by Technorati - now, if you want it.

For an example, mine looks like this (at the moment the live version's in my sidebar on the right):


If you too want a Technorati tag cloud for your blog (shows the top 20 tags) in advance of the official release, here's how. But note the gotchas, below.

Technorati tag cloud widget code

Use this code in your template (but change URL to your blog's URL, bearing in mind the note in my previous post that you mustn't include the "index.html" or similar part of your homepage URL):

<script src="http://widgets.technorati.com/t.js" type="text/javascript"></script><a href="http://technorati.com/blogs/URL?sub=tr_tagcloud_t_ns" class="tr_tagcloud_t_js" style="color:#4261DF" >View Cloud</a>

How to add Technorati tag cloud to New Blogger blogs with one click

UPDATE: Blogger keeps messing up the code in the form on publishing, so I've given up.

You can add the Technorati tag cloud to your blog using the Add button which you can find (with a few other "add widget" buttons) here.

Click the Add to Blogger button below (any mistakes are mine not Kirk's, please let me know if you spot any! UPDATE: this is odd. Blogger Help say you should escape code inside the widget.content and widget.template bits. But escaping anything inside the b:includable tags seems to muck things up so the button below doesn't work. NOT escaping that makes it OK again. Hopefully this version should work now):

Step by step instructions on how to add New Blogger third party widgets to your blog: see my post on the Technorati link count widget (the steps relate to the linkcount widget launched last year, but the principles are the same). For this widget I'd recommend leaving it in your sidebar as it's for the whole blog and not just a particular post. You can see it in mine on the right.

(Created for your convenience as people can now make and share their own widgets so that bloggers can easily add third party widgets to their blog layouts with a few clicks without having to know any coding, e.g. the Bluepulse widget, on New Blogger.)

How to add Technorati tag cloud to Classic Blogger blogs

Copy/paste the following code into your Old Blogger template, wherever you want the Technorati tag cloud to appear:

<script src="http://widgets.technorati.com/t.js" type="text/javascript"></script><a href="http://technorati.com/blogs/<$BlogURL$>?sub=tr_tagcloud_t_ns" class="tr_tagcloud_t_js" style="color:#4261DF" >View Cloud</a>

Gotchas, and how to style the Technorati tag cloud

UPDATE 11 April: now officially launched, see this post, but the styling's still not easy. First, the Technorati tag cloud widget isn't official yet. This is just a sneak preview based on some detective work - it's not even an official "pre-release" version. So it may not work fully yet. In particular, you'll see the formatting's not as nice as it could be, in fact it looks a bit messy, but there we are. Hopefully they'll be adding an easy way to style the tagcloud, before they officially launch this widget.

UPDATE: Technorati haven't made it easier as per my suggestion below, nor have they given us the info needed to tailor things easily ourselves, but Chris Looseley has with experimentation worked out the classes Technorati have used, what they're named, how they've used them, and - most !importantly (pun intended) - how to override them so that you can tailor the look and feel of the Technorati tag cloud to tie in with your blog's individual colour scheme. Chris has kindly shared his findings in his comments to this post - please see the comments from this one onwards. Thanks Chris!

Second, the widget only displays a cloud of tags as picked up by Technorati. If Technorati fail to pick up properly-coded tags from your blog (and they often fail!), their tag cloud obviously won't reflect your blog tags fully. Their ongoing problem with tags "missing" from their tag pages has afflicted countless numbers of bloggers since Technorati introduced tags. They've still not got to the bottom of those bugs, just see e.g. this post - my latest report to them of tags not getting indexed or displayed, maybe a month or two ago, went completely unanswered, so I don't hold out much hope of their fixing this issue. I've kinda given up blogging about the issue or trying to help pinpoint the problem, they really have to get their own house in order now.

New Blogger label cloud - better alternative?

If you're on the now feature complete fancy New Blogger, formerly known as Blogger Beta, you can already display a Blogger label cloud on your blog courtesy of Kirk's own New Blogger Tag Cloud / New Blogger Label Cloud code.)

Blogger labels also get picked up as "tags" on Technorati (or would, if Technorati wasn't so buggy), but you have more control over them. Plus, Kirk's cloud uses label data from Blogger's own databases, so you can rely on it accurately reflecting your Blogger labels (unlike Technorati tags). So you're probably better off using labels (unless you want e.g. to split out labels/categories from tags/keywords, which is another matter altogether).

Labels: Blogger, New Blogger, tagging, Technorati, tools

Blogosphere search engine Technorati recently launched 3 new widgets, including what they've called the Technorati Authority widget.

It's a bit of Javascript code that you can put in your template sidebar to display, live, your blog's current "Technorati Authority (the higher, the better)" (according to the Technorati blog post on this by Tantek Çelik).

If you're keen to add the widget in your blog, below is how you can do it easily, for both New Blogger and Blogger Classic blogs.

But read on after that if you're interested in an observation or two about "Technorati Authority", and also something about the New Blogger template tag for a blog's URL.

How to add Technorati blog authority widget to New Blogger blogs with one click

UPDATE: Blogger keeps messing up the code in the form on publishing, so I've given up. See the Add button plus other "add widget" buttons here. Just click the Add to Blogger button below (UPDATE: this is odd. Blogger Help say you should escape code inside the widget.content and widget.template bits. But escaping anything inside the b:includable tags seems to muck things up so the button below doesn't work. NOT escaping that makes it OK again. Hopefully this version should work now):

Step by step instructions on how to add New Blogger third party widgets to your blog: see my post on the Technorati link count widget (the steps relate to the linkcount widget launched last year, but the principles are the same). For this widget I'd recommend leaving it in your sidebar as it's for the whole blog and not just a particular post. You can see it in mine on the right.

Give it a couple of minutes for things to "take" on Technorati - the badge won't appear on your blog instantly.

(The Add form tool above is a Magical Sheep production (as in, I have a go at something, and Kirk fixes my mistakes and vastly improves on it!), created for your convenience as people can now make and share their own widgets so that bloggers can easily add third party widgets to their blog layouts with a few clicks without having to know any coding, e.g. the Bluepulse widget, on the now feature complete fancy New Blogger, formerly known as Blogger Beta)

How to add Technorati blog authority widget to Classic Blogger blogs

Copy/paste the following code into your Old Blogger template, wherever you want the blog authority badge to appear:

<script src="http://widgets.technorati.com/t.js" type="text/javascript"> </script><a href="http://technorati.com/blogs/<$BlogURL$>?sub=tr_authority_t_ns" class="tr_authority_t_js" style="color:#4261DF">View blog authority</a> 

How to add Technorati blog authority widget on other blogging platforms

The code given by Technorati is quite straightforward, use the Old Blogger code above but change <$BlogURL$> to your blog's URL.

One gotcha which Kirk discovered - you must use your home site URL without pointing to any specific pages. Technorati doesn't seem to like it, otherwise. So for instance using http://consumingexperience.blogspot.com would work, or consumingexperience.blogspot.com or even consumingexperience.blogspot.com/ - but not http://consumingexperience.blogspot.com/index.html (any "www" is fine, it's just the .html or similar at the end that will stop it working).

Technorati Blog Authority - what is it, really?

Now some thoughts about Technorati's "blog authority" figure.

See my blog's authority in my sidebar on the right? At the moment it's 201. See the screenshot from Technorati below?

Nope, I don't see a "201" there either. In fact, at present my blog's "rank" is 18,653. The closest number to 201 is 198, the number of blogs which have linked to my blog in the last 180 days (this Technorati blog post explains all three of the figures given for each blog on Technorati; a few months ago they tweaked how they produce those blog statistics).

As it happens, last night the two numbers did match - number of linking blogs, and number shown by the widget.

The "blog authority" figure is in fact the number of blogs who have linked to yours in the last 6 months, so like share prices it may go up or down. Why the widget shows a slightly different number from the live search on Technorati's site is beyond me, but I suspect the widget may take a while to catch up.

Here's a couple more screenshots to illustrate - in relation to Liz Strauss and John Tropea's blogs. You'll see that "authority" really is the number of blogs linking to their blogs; and that for them, at the time of this post anyway, the widget and Technorati's page do match:

Screenshot of Liz's info on Technorati:
Liz's blog authority badge:
I've used screenshots so you can compare the two, but if you want to see the live widget it's here: View Successful Blog's blog authority

Screenshot of John's info on Technorati:

His blog authority badge:John's live widget: View Library Clips' blog authority

So, this is a little confusing. Technorati have introduced another concept, "authority", which isn't in fact explained by them explicitly anywhere that I can see. And it is different from "ranking". Why they haven't introduced a widget for "ranking", I'm not sure - it would be easier for most people to follow, I think (the higher the rank, the better). Maybe they will, at some point?

New Blogger's data tags: homepageUrl

Now, a thought and questions on Blogger's data tags.

With New Blogger's layouts approach using widget tags, there are data tags which have replaced the classic Blogger template tags.

In New Blogger, the equivalent of the old tag which gave you the URL of the blog seems to be <data:blog.homepageUrl>. However, unlike the old Blogger equivalent, BlogURL, that data tag doesn't produce the main home URL of the site - for the homepage URL it in fact prints out, e.g. in the case of my blog, http://consumingexperience.blogspot.com/index.html. Yup, with the "index.html".

Result: you can't use the tag with the new Technorati blog authority widget, it just won't work (see the note above under other blogging platforms). Kirk, who spotted this, had to do his usual Javascript jazz to strip out the index.html from the URL output by the data tag, in order for the Technorati widget to work properly.

We're curious as to why Blogger designed the new data tag to do that. Will they be coming out with an alternative data tag that just produces the homepage URL, without the "index.html", for use in third party widgets that only function properly with the base URL? Maybe Pete, Eric or Lexi or someone else from Team Blogger might be able to enlighten us?

UPDATE: as mentioned above, another oddity is that if you try to include the form for adding widgets within a Blogger post, the Blogger post editor does something funny to the code. You're supposed to escape the bits inside widget.content and widget.template but the post editor just extra escapes it so the tags and script inside the template, once the widget is added, won't work properly.

I've had Blogger post editor do weird things to my posts before with lots of extra ampersands and semicolons in particular, when I've tried to set out example code within a post (or edit a post with code in it). I'd be interested to know if others have had that problem too. I've had it since Old Blogger. I guess that it's not a priority for Blogger as I suspect relatively few of their users post code. Maybe the lesson is, if you have to have code, or forms, put them somewhere else other than in a Blogger post (like upload them to Google Pages)!

Labels: Blogger, New Blogger, Technorati, tools