You may have noticed that I’ve made some changes to the byline and meta line of my posts, so they link to related Technorati tags. This makes it easier for people using Technorati to find my posts when they’re looking for information on a certain topic that I’ve addressed (such as Intelligent Design).
There are several ways to do this, but most of them create Technorati tags in a separte paragraph at the end of the post, which isn’t really where they belong. Here’s how to get them in the byline.
First, you’ll want to get the great WordPress plugin Bunny’s Technorati Tags. By default, this plugin creates a separate paragraph for the tags. However, since Technorati tags are a type of metadata, I think they should go in the closing byline with the other metadata, such as the link to the comments and so forth. So, find the line at the end of the plugin file (bunny-tags.php) that looks like this: ‘, $separator = ‘, ‘)
function the_bunny_tags($before = '
and change it to this:
function the_bunny_tags($before = '', $after = ' | ', $separator = ' | ')
You can of course use something else to separate the tags; just make sure you remove the
tag and its closer.
Next, we have to edit the post section of your template. Mine looks like this:
| « Previous | Next »
Justin,
I tried the Bunny-Tags plugin, but it wasn’t working happily, so I figured I’d start tweaking. I liked the simplicity of your earlier hack and wanted to stick to that. I really wanted to retain the Technorati Tag link as well as the category link, but without repeating the tag list. Inspired/Built upon your earlier hack, here’s what I came up with:
” title=”Search Technorati for links to this post”>Inbound links
| Tags:
category_nicename . ‘”
title=”Search Technorati for posts tagged ‘ . $cat->cat_name . ‘”>
cat_ID . ‘”
title=”More posts from the ‘ . $cat->cat_name . ‘ category”>’ . $cat->cat_name . ‘ | ‘; } ?>
You can substitute your code block for this one to display the post metadata, and you’ll get a new line with the Technorati logo shown once for each category name - the logo is a link to search that tag on Technorati, but the text is still a link to the category on your own blog. Note you’ll need to adjust the path to the Technorati logo image as well as the link to the category if your blog is not in /wordpress/ on your install. The displayed line includes inlinks and comments, but I’ve nice-ified the reporting of the comment count. Just add css rules and you’re done.
Sorry I can’t give you a link to my working example right now, as it’s on a blog design that isn’t public yet… should be coming soon though.
Thanks for the inspiration here.
btw, while we’re on the subject of WordPress hacks, do you have one that will provide an RSS feed for a category? After that, I may also need a recent-comment plugin that will omit specified categories… this would enable the setting of a special category that is for all intents and purposes hidden, but you could still call up its content with a direct link to it or by using the RSS feed. This would basically give WordPress the ability to do a full-featured “blog-within-a-blog”. (i.e., it could be a simple link blog but it’d have comments, trackback, an RSS feed, …and it’d all be in the same control panel) There is a plugin already available to hide categories and suppress their display from feeds, but the recent-comment plugins ignore that one. Any ideas there?
Hhmmm, I used the “code” tags but that didn’t come out right… trying again with < and > in the html tags changed to [ and ] respectively, we’ll see if this goes:
[span class="postmetadata"]
[a href="http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&fc=1&url=category_nicename . '"
title="Search Technorati for posts tagged ' . $cat->cat_name . '"]
[img src="/images/technorati.gif" alt="Technorati Logo"][/a]
[a href="/wordpress/index.php?cat='. $cat->cat_ID . '"
title="More posts from the ' . $cat->cat_name . ' category"]‘ . $cat->cat_name . ‘[/a] | ‘; } ?]
[/span]
Bro. Maynard-
WordPress automatically generates RSS feeds on a per-category basis (see the feed-options page on this site for examples). The default path is:
blogname.com/category/categoryname/feed
No idea on excluding a category from recent comments…great idea, though. You might search/ask at the WordPress support forum.