Technorati Tags for Blogger

The biggest downside to hosting this blog on Blogger is that there is no direct support for Technorati tags or even a category system for posts that could easily be mapped to Technorati. Links for tags can easily be inserted into a post though. As long as the link has an attribute rel="tag", the last part of the link will be used as the tag name for that post. For example, the following link will add the tag "chickens":

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/chickens" rel="tag" >chickens</a>

Lots more details on how to do this and work with Technorati tags in general is on the A Consuming Experience blog.

Following along these lines, here's what I've done to make this as easy as possible. First, I created a template for blog postings that adds a div for tags at the bottom, along with a default tag link. I've also disabled the "Convert Line Breaks" setting for blog postings so that the template doesn't all have to be on one line. Here's what this looks like:

<div class="tags">
<ul>
<li>Tags:</li>
<li><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/TAG_NAME" rel="tag">TAG_NAME</a></li>
</ul>
</div>

Next I added styles for the tags class to the CSS for my blog. Basically I just changed the list style to be inline with no style for the list items, and added a light border. I'll probably update this to make it look "better" when I have a slow day.

So, when posting a blog, all I'll have to do now is type my content, fill in some more tags at the bottom, and publish. The only way this will get easier is if Blogger adds native support.

• Tags:
• technorati
• tags
• blogger
• hack