PhotoDude.com

Tue. Apr 13, 2004

Technorati to Textpattern

Quite a few folks are linking to this method of including the Technorati Cosmos within your Moveable Type entries, so visitors can easily click and see any other sites that have commented on what you wrote. The reality is, for most sites 95% of your entries aren’t going to get linked, thus, no Cosmos.

However, if you use Textpattern and would like to do the same thing, the code is easy. Go to Presentation > Forms, and click on “default article” (it should be the form that loads automatically). Somewhere towards the end of your form, add this code:

<a href="http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html
?rank=&url=<txp:permlink>" title="Technorati Cosmos">Other blogs commenting on this post</a>

(remove the line break after “search.html” so the long URL is all on one line)

More useful, but requiring handcoding within your entry, would be to insert the Cosmos link right after your link to an outside article (for example, Dave Sifry’s article above that everyone is talking about). That way you could direct visitors to other sites commenting on the same article you are, even if they don’t know your site even exists. To do so, you’d have to add the code by hand after a link to an article:

<a href="http://www.example.com">Read this</a> <a href="http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html
?rank=&url=http://www.example.com" title="Technorati Cosmos">[Cosmos]</a>

(remove the line break after “search.html” so the long URL is all on one line)

In the end (with a small amount of added styling) you could link to Dave’s article [COSMOS], as well as anyone who links to your own article, like this one [COSMOS]