Technorati, a leading blog search engine and index, has made it very easy for blog authors to get their "tagged" blog entries into Technorati's tag index. What is a tag? A tag is a type of category, and the process of tagging a simplified categorization method for your entries. The concept of tags has become popular with services such as del.icio.us and Flickr. By creating tag classifications for your weblog entries, you make it easy for Technorati to index your blog entries by tags that you specify. With Technorati tagging, you get to choose how you want your weblog entries to be classified, in contrast to algorithm-driven search engines like Google that make their own...

continue reading ...

A clever bit of hackery from the folks at Technorati just launched today: Technorati: Using Technorati Tags.

By collecting all the Flickr images and del.icio.us links tagged with a particular word, and adding in all the weblog posts categorized with that same word, they've created tag pages on a wide range of topics. You can browse popular tags or check out individual words, if you want to track a single topic such as LiveJournal.

Trackbacks:

Six Apart Professional Network - Tags plugin for Movable Type - January 15, 2005 12:06 PMHot on the heels of the release of Technorati Tags comes a Movable Type plugin which will automatically generate keywords for a post to populate...

continue reading ...

The Technorati team is celebrating the third birthday of the popular blog search service. Congratulations to the whole team, and thanks to Niall Kennedy for the reminder.

Niall's blog, like Technorati's official blog, is powered by Movable Type, which means that sending an update notification ping to the service is really easy -- just check the box and you're set. (TypePad and LiveJournal users don't need to do anything; Both services send updates out through the Six Apart Update Stream so Technorati can grab them directly.)

And once you're letting Technorati know your content is updated, you'll want to claim your blog and then check out cool features like the brand-new Technorati Mini. We've been enjoying the hyperactive little popup search window, and we think you will too....

continue reading ...

Dave Sifry has opened up a Technorati interface that allows outside developers to use the Technorati data. I've whipped up a quick MT plugin that can get the Technorati link Cosmos for your entire blog or a specific entry and insert it into your blog pages.

continue reading ...

The team at Technorati just announced the launch of their new beta site, which collects much of the features and functionality that have been available on the popular blog-tracking service and wraps them in a friendly and fun interface.

In addition to the new look, Technorati's site now has a company blog talking about service news, as well as a developer blog with details for people who want to build on top of the service. Both Movable Type-powered blogs are useful additions to the roster of services available from Technorati, and should help make it easier for a new audience to discover more of the blogosphere.

Trackbacks:

Previous Entry: Rico AJAX library

Next Entry:...

continue reading ...

Plugin wrapper for the Technorati API.

continue reading ...

Technorati's begun reaching out to their developer community with their new Developer Program, which includes a new mailing list, a developer's wiki, and a contest offering prizes ranging up to $2500 at the Apple Store. Membership in the program is free.

Trackbacks:

Previous Entry: Feedster developer contest

Next Entry: PubSub relaunches

continue reading ...

If you're in the Bay Area and interested in blogs and web services, you might want to swing by the Technorati Party tonight, where there's sure to be a lot of blog-tech talk and a number of Six Apart staff will be present as well.

Trackbacks:

Previous Entry: Five years of blogging

Next Entry: Poetry on a Deadline

continue reading ...

The Technorati team has launched Blog Finder, a new service for discovering the blogs around specific topics. Grouped by tags, blogs can be discovered by the service if they've followed the provided instructions on how to describe a site.

The service hasn't been out long, but it's already inspired some detailed analysis from the user community, which should help refine and improve Blog Finder in the future.

Trackbacks:

Previous Entry: 2005 Black Weblog Awards winners announced

Next Entry: WSJ on Blog Search Engines

continue reading ...

Technorati's expanded their web services API with the addition of TagQuery, which lets you retrieve a list of posts which are tagged with a given word.

And of course, if you're looking for an easy way to assign tags to your posts, you can try the TechnoratiTags plugin George Hotelling made.

Trackbacks:

Previous Entry: Google AdWords API

Next Entry: Atom Syndication Format draft 05

continue reading ...

Keep your eyes peeled: Technorati is promising to announce the winner of their developer contest today. Good luck to all the entrants.

Trackbacks:

Previous Entry: On the cover of Fortune

Next Entry: Gizmodo scores an interview with Gates

continue reading ...

Adriaan Tijsseling's released two new bits of code that he's been working on. The first displays a list of recently-played songs from the last.fm service, which is handy for putting your music list on your site, and the second is a revamped version of the MTTechnorati plugin, which pulls information from the Technorati service and lets you display it within your blog.

Trackbacks:

Previous Entry: Helping your career with blogs

Next Entry: 2004 Weblog Awards

continue reading ...

The idea of "tags" and "tagging" has become very popular in the recent past. The idea behind tags is really that of organization and cross-referencing, though specific implementation and implementation with Movable Type varies. TechnoratiTags and ishbadiddle's subject index are examples of two different tag uses. This article is not about implementations; to find this useful you'll want to be using tags already.

I think tagging is great way of thinking. The problem, however, is that it's easy to create near-duplicate tags: "photo" or "photos," "MovableType" or "Movable Type," for example....

continue reading ...

Tutorials in Alphabetical Order

"Email Me" Contact Forms A Safe Way to Upgrade to MT 3.2 Add Your Links Here Adding a Footer Adding a Sidebar - MT3.1 and Earlier Adding a Sidebar to the Default Archive Templates Alphabetize Your Entries Amazon Web Services An Overview of the MT Program File Directories Applying MT3 Style Templates to MT2.X Background Patterns Backing Up Your Blog Banner Images Blog Maintenance Blogger Audioblogging with Movable Type CGIWrap and suEXEC Category Archive Pages Category Customizations Closing Comments Colors - Background, Banner, Headline, and Font Colors - Experimenting With, Using MTSetVar and MTGetVar Combining Multiple Blogs Into One Concerning Spam Converting from Fixed to Fluid Style...

continue reading ...

As will undoubtedly make the rounds everywhere in the blogosphere today, Google has just launched Google Blog Search. Google's perhaps the single company most identitied with search, so their entrance into the blog search space is a big milestone even though the idea of blog search has been around for years.

For the basics of what the Blog Search team has done, you can take a look at the Frequently-Asked Questions list which does a good job of covering the basics. But at a time when everyone will be talking about (and hopefully thinking about) blog search again, it makes sense to review where we've been so far, and what problems need to be solved in the realm of blog search.

First, the new Blog Search...

continue reading ...

This tutorial is written by LMT guest author Mike Everett-Lane of Ishbadiddle.

A Subject Index can give context to your posts and makes it easier for your readers to browse what you've written on specific topics. Unlike Categories, which are limited, top-down, and hierarchical, Subject tags are open-ended and limitless. While your blog's Category system is like the Table of Contents of a book, a Subject Index is like the book's Index, one that is constantly updated.

First, you might want to read my blog post on how the use of Subject Indexes can improve the organization of your blog. You can see it in action there as well as here on LMT. For instance, here's the index of all my subjects, and the index of all my posts on the subject of...

continue reading ...

If you use the Upload File feature in Movable Type, you've no doubt got a folder full of uploaded files. If you use the default "Local Archive Path" or "Local Site Path" destination, you've got a folder full of uploads mixed in with your web pages. I always want to keep my uploaded files separate from all of the web pages just for organization. But now my /uploads/ folder has over 1300 files in it and finding anything is impossible. I needed a better organization method and I didn't want to have to actively think about it.

2005/04/19 Update: The method has been refined quite a bit with The Easy Way, using JavaScript.

2005/05/10 Update: This method is superceded by...

continue reading ...

<MTPerlScript> is tag for Movable Type templates. If you know how to write Perl code, this custom tag gives you remarkable flexibility in producing pages from Movable Type. You can literally do any kind of manipulation you can think of using your Movable Type data.

This tag was written with a 'trust-the-programmer' mentality (or in this case, the template writer). There aren't any restrictions...

continue reading ...

Hot on the heels of the release of Technorati Tags comes a Movable Type plugin which will automatically generate keywords for a post to populate the Keywords field in Movable Type and then create links to Technorati tags for those keywords. Slick.

Trackbacks:

All things Bru - Technorati tags, the easy way - January 16, 2005 04:38 AMWas thinking about the technorati tags stuff over and over, it really caught me :) Anyway, suddenly I remembered reading a post, last summer, by that crazy old adventurer wrapped in journalist clothes that is Ben Hammersley, where he announced quitting...

Previous Entry: Blog Business Summit Q&A

Next Entry: Blogs on Film

continue reading ...

Movable Type has a nifty feature called "alternate templates" which allows you to substitute the default MT interface with a customized one. These aren't "individual archive" or "category archive" template replacements, these are replacements for the actual entry-editing interface.

I've only made a handful of alternate templates, but more will be added here as I create and modify them. (You might want to look at set up first.) Currently available are: • Updated 2005/08/29: edit_entry.tmpl is for creating and editing entries. • Added 2005/05/30: preview_entry.tmpl is for previewing entries. (Deprecated. Superceded by the plugin Better Entry Preview.)...

continue reading ...