Saturday, 9 July 2005

Technorati - tag creator for multiple word tags (and Technorati problems)






OK, my previous post is not showing up on Technorati's tag pages (again), even though it's on their search page. (Plus posts are showing up all in the wrong order.)

So to help people find my post with info on tag generators/tag creators which can handle multiple word Technorati tags (bookmarklet, Greasemonkey script, online form), here is the link to the post. And this is a shorter simpler post so I hope it at least will appear on Technorati's tag pages.

Technorati have said via Niall Kennedy (see the last para of this comment) that their crawler doesn't like posts with invalid XHTML. I've been trying to validate my template all day using Tidy as built into Firefox with the Web developers' toolbar.

The only problems left are warnings which I can't do anything about (because they're to do with URI encoding which if you use the Blogger template tags to generate permalinks and post titles will appear in the "illicit" format, like it or not) - or else they're to do with stuff I have no clue about like nested emphases whatever that is; or else they seem to reflect an Anglosaxon-centric approach to validation, as it's only the sections with Korean etc characters which throw up a problem.

A couple of the warnings seem to do with Blogger's own suggested way of setting up the template, in their help on comments - e.g. anchor comments already defined; and they suggest using "<a name="<$BlogCommentNumber$>"></a>" in the template, but Tidy seems not to like that ("cannot copy name attribute to id"). How are we supposed to deal with that sort of thing?

It's also hard to know what to do about the content of individual posts. For example in my post about the problems with Technorati tag pages, I put in code to conduct a few polls, and as you know with many free services they require you to include their code as is, without any changes. If their code isn't valid, e.g. input elements aren't closed, what are we supposed to do - break the terms of the free service by altering their code to make them valid XHTML, or risk Technorati not indexing the post on their tag pages? A dilemma, indeed.

Technorati say they are constantly adjusting their crawler behaviour, so hopefully they will make it ever more tolerant, to deal with situations like these.


Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If you are sick of the YourTagsCannotBeMultiwordPhrases limitation of delicious and other such sites, have a look at Simpy, which eliminites this problem, lets you use single words or phrases for your tags.
The URL: http://simpy.com/

[posted by Otis at 7/09/2005 01:07:30 PM, accidentally deleted by a bungling Improbulus, you'll see how in this post - sorry I know Otis gave his blog URL in the original comment but I have no record of that, just the email of the comment which doesn't have that info.]