Ever since I switched over to a new CMS back in February, I’ve been tagging all my journal entries. Until now, I haven’t been doing anything with those tags apart from exposing them in category elements in my RSS feed. Now that I’ve got a good head of steam going with my tags, I’ve decided to play around with them a bit.
Each journal entry page now shows the tags at the end of the post. These are linked (using rel-tag of course) to an aggregate tag page that shows any other posts with the same tag. Pretty standard stuff.
But then I thought it would be fun to tie the post in with other things I’ve tagged, not on this site but on Del.icio.us. Under the heading “Related”, you’ll find links to the same tags for my del.icio.us links.
Rather then sending you off to Del.icio.us, I’m using the Del.icio.us API to bring the results back to this site. Using a bit of Ajax, these results are displayed without a page refresh. I’m using Hijax so if JavaScript is disabled, the links will still work.
I’ve got a nice little progress bar going while the request is being sent, and a bit of a colour fade happening when the response comes back. The results themselves could probably do with some more styling. Right now I’m just displaying them in a regular unordered list of x-folk entries but I think they might look nice if they were more comment-like in appearance.
After the Del.icio.us links, I’ve got the same tags pointing off to Technorati. Again, instead of sending you away, I’m pulling in the results with the Technorati API. In some ways, these results are more interesting than the del.icio.us links because, instead of just showing things that I have tagged, this shows results from everywhere. The results are constantly changing. Right now I’m using the search query, but I must look into the experimental tag query.
I’m also using the Technorati API to find any blogs that are linking to the current post. This works like Trackback. If you want to respond to a post I’ve written, just blog about it. As long as you include a link back to the post, your entry will now show up in the results. It won’t be instantaneous, but if your blogging software is set up to ping Technorati when you post, it should show up pretty fast. I’d be interested in finding out just how long it takes for the API to reflect recent pings. If you blog about this post (with a link), try coming back to it and using the Technorati link to see how long your post takes to show up.
The Technorati API isn’t the most full-featured and sometimes it just seems to not respond. The Del.icio.us API allows me to do quite a bit with my own links, but doesn’t offer any access to other peoples’. Still, by combining the two with the tags for any particular journal entry, an interesting picture emerges.
I have some other ideas for making individual journal entry pages more interesting. None of them involve the addition of buttons that invite the reader to add the page to Digg, Newsvine, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Furl, Magnolia, Blinklist, or any other others I may be forgetting.