A Consuming Experience

If you add Technorati tags to your blog posts, you might also use Technorati's tagcloud widget ("Blog Top Tags" widget), officially launched in April 2007, to include a tag cloud on your blog too. For those not familiar with it, this widget displays the 20 top tags used in your blog as displayed by Technorati on their tag pages (if you're on Blogger: add Top Tags cloud to your blog with a couple of clicks).

Now Technorati haven't exactly set things up to make their tagcloud look pretty for non-techie users, nor have they made it easy for us bloggers to tweak the Top Tags clouds to match the look of our own blogs e.g. design, style, colour scheme. It seems from what Tantek Çelik said in a comment on my original post on their tag cloud that Technorati basically expect their users / consumers to figure out the setup ourselves and then tweak our own templates individually.

Well, I'm pleased to say that Chris Loosley has come to the rescue. With careful experimentation he's worked out the classes Technorati have used, what they're named, how they've used them, and - most !importantly (pun intended!) - the best way 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 appearance. Chris has kindly shared his findings in his comments to this post - please see his comments from this one onwards and now on his blog (updated). Thanks Chris!

However see also the rest of my gotchas. Remember the Top Tags widget will only display tags which Technorati have picked up, stored and will return from their tags database. Well, their crawler indexes blog posts for their search database, but often tags get missed out from their tags database. You can't see those tags on their tags pages.

This element of tagging has been buggy on Technorati ever since the start and been extensively blogged by many - e.g. see this Google search result, even though according to Technorati everything in the known universe about "Technorati tags" problems consists only of one blog post... (even more amusingly, according to Technorati there is also "Nothing in the known universe about Technorati tag problems"!).

The problem still persists even though Dave Sifry of Technorati emailed me quite some time ago to say they were still on it, after I did some tests to try to bottom the problem, was it their indexing or retrieval, etc (it seems to be related to how much you have in your post, and whether you have set out code in it, I'm guessing, but who knows). Anyway, despite their rolling out a flash new look for Technorati recently, they don't say anything about whether they've fixed the tagging bug finally. In fact they've never said anything official on their site about the bug, only in comments to various blog posts about it. So I've given up on that point. They've even stopped replying to my support requests when I've reported that tags for certain new posts aren't getting picked up.

So you've been warned, the top tags won't be 100% accurate as Technorati don't pick up 100% of your properly-formatted tags. But overall it should hopefully give a general idea, and I know people like tag clouds. (If you're on Blogger and prefer label clouds, try this one). Enjoy!

(I've not bothered to tailor my own Top Tags cloud look, in case you wonder, as I'll be getting widgety with my blog as soon as I can, and will incorporate a properly-customised tag cloud in that version. Not planning to do any work on changing this template unless absolutely necessary.)

Labels: blogging, consumer, problems, tagging, tools

I'm now pleased to unveil... the Magical Sheep Spring Collection of New Blogger Widgets! Designed for the cool New Blogger about town who wants to grab some widgets for their blog using New Blogger's neat Add Page Elements feature. Brought to you by the Magical Sheep team, Kirk and Improbulus.

Yes, you too can now add a widget to your blog simply by clicking a button or two and dragging the widget in Layouts, if you're using the now feature complete fancy New Blogger, formerly known as Blogger Beta. G'wan, whatcha waiting for? (Produced since people can now make and share their own widgets to enable bloggers to easily add third party widgets to their blog layouts with a few clicks without having to know any coding, e.g. the Bluepulse widget.)

The widgets collection

At the moment, the collections page just has Technorati stuff for widgets relating to the blogosphere search engine Technorati, plus links (for completeness) to some clever widgets etc for New Blogger by Kirk:

• Technorati Blog Top Tags tagcloud widget -see further this post, the Technorati tools page and Technorati blog post
• Technorati Blog Authority widget - see this post, the Technorati tools page plus this intro and further explanation from the Technorati
• Technorati Link Counter widget for individual posts - see this post, and Technorati's link count page, blog intro and David Sifry's blog
• Kirk's Picasa Web Albums widget maker
• Kirk's Blogger label cloud instructions.
  

I thought it would be helpful to have a bunch of widgets together on one page, and I do plan to add to the list in future. More importantly, I'm using Google Pages for those Add widget forms because Blogger is still messing up the code on this blog on publishing when the forms are within a Blogger post, so if you tried the buttons from my previous posts and they didn't work, that's why - sorry about that, they should work fine on the new page.

Technorati tag cloud design; Technorati bugs

Now, more on the Technorati tagcloud. The comment by Tantek Çelik (Technorati's chief technologist) about how to get the cloud to look better in my blog was helpful, but it only applies to my specific blog. Your mileage may vary.

Far be it for a novice still finding her way to beg to differ from a CSS guru, never mind one who's had a hack named after him. But I still think Technorati could have, and can yet, make it easier for us mere users, especially non-CSS experts (which means most of us!) to tweak the format of the Technorati cloud to tie in better with the designs of their own individual blogs - as Delicious have done with their own tag cloud. For more details, see further my response to Tantek's comment, which I won't repeat here.

I'd be interested to know what others think of this issue, and of course whether Technorati will be improving things at their end. It's great that David (I assume that's Dave Sifry, Technorati CEO though he seems to have a different Blogger profile now) has just reported that a bug causing legit blogs not to be indexed has finally been fixed.

But I won't be holding my breath about stuff like styling clouds, given that their ongoing problems with tags is still extant despite David's acknowledgement of my bug report and assurance way back in February 2006 that they'd get to the bottom of the issue. Now that he's reporting on the state of tags as well as the blogosphere generally, surely it's more important than ever that Technorati should be accurate in its recording of tags. Which it won't be, if it still keeps inexplicably missing out on picking up the tags from entire posts on reams of blogs.

Labels: blog metrics, New Blogger, tagging, tools

Technorati have now officially launched their blog-specific tagcloud, which I blogged about yesterday. They call it the "Blog Top Tags" widget and you can use it to display the 20 top tags used in your blog as a tag cloud.

One-click New Blogger Blog Top Tags widget

Bloggers on New Blogger (Blogger Beta) using Layouts may be interested in the New Blogger widget I produced yesterday (see this post), which lets you add a Blog Top Tags tagcloud to your blog with just a couple of clicks by clicking an "Add to Blogger" button without having to know any coding or delve into the HTML of your template: get tagcloud for your Blogger blog. [updated to link direct to page with the button.]

I've also provided the code there for Old Blogger blogs which you can copy/paste into your template without having to change anything in the code.

And included a note about continuing bugs with Technorati tags which may prevent the tag cloud from reflecting your blog tags accurately.

(Linking to their blog post from yesterday's post won't get that post to show up in the "blog reactions" for their post because blog reactions don't pick up updates to existing posts (it's the same with Google Blogsearch and backlinks - a flaw with both systems, I feel), so I'm doing this separate new post, which hopefully will show up in their "blog reactions" in order to point people to the New Blogger widget.)

Labels: New Blogger, tagging, tools

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