Geekalanche!

Been collecting a few links lately, expecting to make blog posts about them eventually, but never having the time. So, here’s a whole buttload of ’em all at once. Enjoy.

Ask Jeeves has acquired Bloglines. Since we all know how wonderful it turns out when a big company swallows up a cool little one, this must be great news.

As much as I’m miffed at Google for that whole AdSense thing, I gotta admit they keep coming up with the coolest toys. The latest is Google Maps. Wicked cool. Ayuh.

Sometimes I make everything sound harder than it really is. I couldn’t figure out Technorati Tags for the longest time until the Metroblogging sites added them. But there really isn’t anything to them from the blogger’s perspective (assuming you use one of the “standard” blogging platforms, like Movable Type, and you publish an RSS feed). Getting your posts included in the Technorati Tags category pages automatically is actually a snap. All you have to do is add Technorati to the list of sites you ping when you make a new post. (Remember when you added the Blogrolling pinger, because you were pissed off at Dave Winer and stopped pinging Weblogs.com? Yeah, like that!)

In Movable Type, for example, just go into your Weblog Config and under Preferences and Publicity/Remote Interfaces/Trackback add http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping to the box.

Once you do that, any post that has a category will show up in the tag page for that category. For example, my Morning Ritual post shows up at the tag page for Life, the Universe and Everything. And I didn’t have to lift a finger. Sweet.

Just to be fancy, I added a link to the Technorati Cosmos page at the bottom of each post, so you can search for other sites that reference the post directly. I also added a link to the Technorati Tags page for the category that the post is linked to. If anyone else is silly enough to name their blogging categories the same as me, then I’ll see their posts on the same page.

To add a Cosmos link in Movable Type, put a link to http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=
<$MTEntryUrl$> in your template.

To add a Tags link in Movable Type, put a link to http://www.technorati.com/tags/<$MTEntryCategory$> in your template.

I’m still working on finding a way to implement Joe Jenett’s PingLinks. He’s been very helpful in letting me play with it, but I think I am going to need to turn it from perl into php for it to work on this blog.

Finally, for you non-techie folks who have never seen the internet before (and, thus, may be experiencing some difficulty reading this post), here is a video that should help sort it all out (um, assuming you know how to click the link and, um, how to get Apple QuickTime installed and… you don’t know what the hell I just said, do you? Never mind.)

Red vs. Blue: Welcome to the Internet

Update: I added a link to the Bloglines Citations search, too. Might as well overload with all the cool toys!

To add a Bloglines link in Movable Type, put a link to http://www.bloglines.com/citations?url=<$MTEntryUrl$>
&submit=Search in your template.