Blogger: Technorati tags Greasemonkey script updated and enhanced

A Consuming Experience

Thoughts on my experiences as a consumer of products, services, people (well maybe not that last one...), from reviews to raves, rants and random thoughts - concentrating on technology, gadgets, software, product usability, consumer issues, customer service. Including some introductory guides and tips on various subjects (like blogging!) which stumped me until I figured them out. And the occasional ever so slightly naughty observation.

Blogger: Technorati tags Greasemonkey script updated and enhanced

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

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I've heavily rewritten my previous post on this tool for Blogger users to add Technorati tags easily to their posts, because the Magical Sheep Greasemonkey userscript has now been updated and enhanced by that King of Kode, Kirk.

That post now has updated full instructions on that script, from scratch, with some history.

If upgrading - IMPORTANT - this version is not compatible with previous versions of this script. if you have an existing version of this script, you MUST first uninstall it (how to uninstall) before installing this version. You may then have to re-enter your "MeTags" and own choice of separator (though if you've been using a previous version they may have been preserved), but that should only take a few seconds.

Get the updated userscript (version 1.0 beta) from Userscripts.org; here's an alternative location for the script if the first is down or slow. And another.

For a full explanation please see the rewritten previous post. If you're familiar with that script already, here's just the changes:

Changes made April 2006 - version 1.0 beta

Bugfix:

Editing tags - after tags have initially been added, deleting a tag or adding a tag to the tag box (and clicking Append) now inserts it or deletes it from the main post box properly. (This bug was in the original script which Kirk adapted and expanded, so don't blame him for it! The script should have been doing that all along, but there was a misuse of single quote marks which stopped it from working before. No one seems to have noticed it until Clamatius pointed it out - thanks Clamatius!)

Improvements:

Better Blogger integration, now works in Edit HTML as well as Compose mode.
Tag settings and options - now hidden by default
Heading/label for tags list - can be changed from "Tags:"
New window - option to have links open in a new browser window (adds target="_blank")
FUTags - ability to set up a list of your most frequently used tags, to add them to the tag box with one click
Your Technorati account only - option to point tag links to tagged posts from your own blog(s) only, if you have signed up with Technorati and claimed your blog. In other words, if you select this option and someone clicks a tag in your post, they will be taken to a page listing all the posts previously tagged with that tag from your blogs only; if other people have used that tag, their posts will not be shown in the list. You must be a Technorati member and have claimed the blogs concerned (see also this page), to use this feature. It will only work in posts published after you install this new version of the script; old posts will not be affected.

(Note: this new feature is set up via Javascript, so that Technorati can still crawl the link, since what they crawl and what points at the user's account are in different formats. From testing, Technorati hasn't had any problem so far picking up tags done in this way.)

Example: If you display the Tag Settings and Options section and tick the Point Links.. box and enter the Technorati username phydeaux3 and OK, then enter the tag "magical sheep" in the Tags box and click Append Tags, the following code will be added to the end of the Blogger post box:
```
<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/magical+sheep" rel="tag" target="_blank" onmouseover="this.href='http://technorati.com/tag/magical+sheep?user=phydeaux3'">magical sheep</a>
```
Editing posts or drafts - it now reads tags back in from a previously published or draft post.
Blogger's post options field - nothing to do with tagging, but Kirk has made that field open all the time with this script (which many of us think is much better), and also added a border round that field just to cover up its previous "naked" look! Isn't he the gentleman...
Tag box/options now hidden in Preview view, unless you have Jasper's script for Keep current time on post, in which case they will be visible. Don't think anything can be done about that, just don't use that box in Preview view.

Technorati Tags: Blog, blogs, blogging, tag, tags, tagging, tag tools, tagging tools, Blogger, Blogger.com, Firefox, addons, blog addons, blogging addons, blog add-ons, blogging add-ons, Technorati, Technoratitags, Technorati tags, Greasemonkey, Greasemonkey scripts, Magical Sheep, phydeaux3, Improbulus, A Consuming Experience, Consuming Experience

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4 Comment(s):

Hi!

Is it ok to use as many technorati tags in one post? As many as I want? Can you tag all the links that referenced in that post?

(By flashdriven, at Saturday, April 29, 2006 1:34:00 AM) Edit Comment

Hi there and thanks for the new Magic Sheep tagger.

I've been testing it out and comparing it to my existing tagger (which is a version I modified from ecmanaut's tagger as some of his tagger features weren't quite what I wanted either!) and I like:
- the 'favourite tags' feature, being able to simply click on the tag names and have them added automatically
- being able to customise the Tag heading. I have a horizontal rule before my tags which was easy to add
- seeing the tags all the time and being able to edit them in preview mode as well
- the fact that the tagging is smart enough to not add a spurious trailing ", " (I had to hack this in myself beforehand)

But being picky:
- I think the technorati logo and tag box is a bit too tall
- I'd like the option of being able to change where the links go to so instead of http://technorati.com/tags/xxx I want to use http://del.ico.us/GiteInBrittany/xxx (OK this was an easy code change for me to make myself but it would be nice if it was a customisable option)
- I'd like the option of not showing the post date/time all the time
- I'd like the Magic Sheep tagger to also include the 'click to tag at Del.ico.us' on the post results page that Ecmanaut's has - this is the one big missing feature for me right now
- I also added a 'View this post' and 'View this post in a new window' option to the post results page

Cheers, Geoffrey

(By Geoffrey Coan, at Monday, May 01, 2006 9:01:00 PM) Edit Comment

Hey Geoffrey,

Thanks for the feedback.

I think the technorati logo and tag box is a bit too tall

I do too. But there is a reason for it being that size. Originally, the tagger used a form input box for the tags input field, but I ran into a problem with that. If you added in more tags than could be 'viewable', then it would scroll along as you typed. That's fine, but when introducing the 'frequently used tags' feature, if you had scrolled past the 'viewable area', then added a fuTag, the tag was added but the input is focused back on the beginning, so you couldn't see what was added. You would have to scroll physically down the input to see it was there, or to add another tag...obviously unacceptable.

I turned the internet inside/out looking for a way to automatically scroll on an input field, to no avail. You can do it with a textarea field, and that's what the tag input area is now.

But that led to another issue, I orig had the textarea only one line high, so it looked more like an input, but if adding more than one line a textarea scrolls up/down. And with the textarea only one line in height, there wasn't enough room for it to display the up/down scroll indicators when needed. So the 'height' of that textarea is just large enough so that the scroll indicators appear when needed. The technorati logo is only there because of that, when I made the textarea taller, it seemed very empty so I decided to fill it in with the technorati logo.

On making it customizable to del.icio.us, well I thought about that too. In the end I decided to keep it technorati only ,for the moment. Probably because I use a different non-greasemonkey way of categorizing with delicious that doesn't need the tagger, so it didn't really interest me. Maybe in the future.

I've seen ecmanauts stuff a while back, very cool. But again, I'm getting most of those features for del.icio.us without using greasemonkey, so I don't know how motivated I'll be to add them to the 'tagger'. I tend to only become interested in things that solve my problems. :-D

But thanks for the feedback. I'll definitely keep those in mind if I ever decide to make the Magical S(h)eep tagger do more than just technorati.

Cheers

(By kirk, at Tuesday, May 02, 2006 1:23:00 AM) Edit Comment

Flashdriven, you can have as many tags as you like - it's up to you, although readers might balk if your tags list is longer than your post! I'm not sure why you'd want to tag all links referenced in your post though? The main point is to use tags to describe the subject matter of your post, which may (or may not) be included in links you use.

As for Geoffrey, I've nothing to add - I leave it all in Kirk's capable hands (as usual!) :D

(By Improbulus, at Thursday, May 04, 2006 8:33:00 AM) Edit Comment