Tagging with Technorati style in pure Blosxom //at 03:22 //by abe

Short summary: I can’t stay away from coding Blosxom plugins. Perl rules. PHP sucks. ;-)

• New version 0.04 of the tagging plugin, supporting Technorati style tag links to many resources.
• New add-on plugin pathbasedtagging to the plugin tagging, implementing Technorati style tag links in pure Blosxom without any help from Apache’s mod_rewrite.
• New plugin dept offering Slashdot like “dept.” lines for Blosxom postings.

Supporting Technorati style tag URLs

After releasing the last version of my Blosxom plugin tagging, I noticed that Technorati only seems to like URLs ending in “/tagname” but not ending in “=tagname” (as they do if you use classic query strings instead of the path info), even if the a tag has a rel="tag" attribute. And not only I noticed this but also some other users of the plugin. (Although I do wonder how Furl made it to a Technorati partner with URLs like http://www.furl.net/furled.jsp?topic=tags…)

So I somehow had to change the syntax style for my tags. This wasn’t very hard for the links, but I wanted them to still link to my blog and not to Technorati, Flickr, Wikipedia or any other external resource.

Implementing Technorati style tag URLs

The obviously easiest solution for someone who’s using and administrating Apache web servers for nearly ten years now was to use some mod_voodoo—eh—mod_rewrite:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/tags/(.*)$ /cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi?-tags=$1 [PT]

That way I could use Technorati style tags and had a well performing solution. But somehow this solution wasn’t that satisfying since it wasn’t pure Blosxom and therefore had some dependency including access to some Apache config file. (Even if the config file was called .htaccess. ;-)

A pure Blosxom solution

A few days ago I somehow noticed that in general a special behaviour on some URLs could also be implemented using Blosxom’s API. Using the entries function to modify the Blosxom internal path itself before Blosxom or e.g. the entries_index runs but not returning any hashes, allows to have some path like URLs not being treated as a path by Blosxom.

Unfortunately this couldn’t be incorporated into the tagging plugin itself, since plugins doing such path interpreting voodoo needs to be ran before any plugin supplying an entries function runs. But the tagging plugin must run after such a plugin. So I created the small add-on plugin pathbasedtagging which is solely thought for use together with the tagging plugin (but may have other, yet unknown purposes).

And since I got asked if they could use the tagging plugin to link to external tag URLs instead of the own blog, I included a ready to use list of more or less popular external tag URLs including Technorati, Flickr, del.icio.us, de.lirio.us and Wikipedia.

from the slashdot dept.

Since I’ve always liked the often sarcastic or even evil comments inside Slashdot’s subtitle alike dept. lines and since I’m also used to use them at Symlink, I wanted them in my blog, too. Time for a new plugin.

The basic work of parsing out the data from the text files the posts reside in was already written for the tagging plugin. So I just had to use that code, simplify it and add some little more code to get the dept plugin whose results you can see in my blog directly beneath the title of a posting since a few days now.

Update 02:52h

Hey, see my Technorati profile: It worked! Technorati recognised the tags! Yeah!

Comments

Re: Tagging with Technorati style in pure Blosxom

Posted by:	Jon Dowland
Website:	http://alcopop.org/
Time:	Fri, 10 Mar 2006 11:13

I'm interested in your tagging plugin and I would use it right away if it worked under static rendering - which I'm not sure it does yet.

Reply

Tagging plugin and static rendering (was: Re: Tagging with Technorati style in pure Blosxom)

Posted by:	Axel
Website:	http://noone.org/blog
Time:	Fri, 10 Mar 2006 13:22

I haven't tested it yet with static rendering, so I can't say if it would work or not. But I expect that at least some thinks wouldn't work.

On the other hand: Since my rendering times approach 1 sec, I'll probably have a look at static rendering the next time, so I'll note this down as TODO respective known bug.

Thanks for the feedback.

Reply

Re: Tagging with Technorati style in pure Blosxom

Posted by:	paresh
Website:	http://research.iiit.ac.in/~paresh/cgi-bin/blog/blosxom.cgi/
Time:	Fri, 31 Mar 2006 14:34

Thanks for the awesome plugin. I had been wondering since long as to how to make use of technorati tags in my blog. Your plugin is just what i needed. I really appreciate you writing it.

I used the pathbasedtagging plugin as well. I have a small problem though. The posts (of a particular tag) are not displayed at all if i use "/tags/xyz"; while they are displayed properly if i use "?-tagz=xyz". This probably means that pathbasedtagging plugin is not working as it is supposed to. Am i correct ?

Can you please visit my page once and check what is going wrong ? I really appreciate all the help.

Thanks once again.

Cheers, Paresh

Reply

Static Rendering

Posted by:	Ranjan.bagchi@frotz.com
Website:	mailto:ranjan.bagchi@frotz.com
Time:	Fri, 21 Apr 2006 20:28

Hi --

Maybe I'm running it wrong, but the statically rendered portion doesn't seem to be working. I'm running blosxom from the crontab periodically to build a static set of web pages, but the tags header just ends up in the text of the post.

Reply

Re: Tagging with Technorati style in pure Blosxom

Posted by:	kenneth
Website:	http://kenneths.org/flog
Time:	Fri, 19 May 2006 06:54

thanks a lot- the plugins are working for me w/o problems. I'll keep checking in w/ technorati to make sure that it's working- but I'll give it a week first. viel danke

Reply

Re: Tagging with Technorati style in pure Blosxom

Posted by:	MM Fitness
Website:	http://milomartinovichfitness.com
Time:	Tue, 30 Jul 2013 22:05

Awesome tut, works great!

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