confessions of a southside catatonic chataholic

ARGH I GOT IT! If I could dance I'd be doing my own special version of a victory dance!! But I have all the rhythm of a fish on prozac. Umm ok - I took my time over the tagging posts exercise 'cause it just went WHOOSH over my head. I'm allowed to admit that - it's a tutorial. So, I slept on it - and had a coffee and hunted around online for ways over and around the whole Technorati and tags thing and FINALLY found something to make it somewhat easier and less confusing for me (which has gotta be a bonus, right? Right!).

I read - and re-read - Technorati's explanation about HOW to tag posts to link to Technorati tags . . . and it may as well have been Bavaria's passion play 'Oberammergau' for all the sense it made to me. The whole 'tag your post' and 'associate your post' and 'special link' was gibberish. Which was only made worse by the 'two word tags joined by' I don't know what!

My playing around online led me to a horribly technical page by Rakesh which tells people how to tag-Technorati (i.e. associate your post with Technorati tags - which from now on I may well call 'tag-Technorati' for short) via use of a bookmarklet. What's a bookmarklet? Damned good question - glad you asked!

A bookmarklet is a web site bookmark that includes processing. Clear as mud? Yeah, same for me, too. According to Wiktionary, it's a piece of JavaScript code that is stored as a URL within a bookmark. And Joe Dolson tells us it's embedded in a browser bookmark and is used as a shortcut to perform a task.

With me so far? Rakesh's Technorati bookmarklet means that instead of having to worry about brackets, plus signs and href-something-or-others, I simply click on the Technorati Bookmarklet link on my Bookmarks toolbar, enter the appropriate descriptive keywords for the post in the dialogue box that pops up and it generates the html codes on its own and I merely copy and paste them into this post. Voila! Hassle free - and I'm so lazy :)

The only hitch I had - and oohh yes, there had to be a hitch with me - is that Rakeh's javascript whatever made no damn sense to me *points to self* the unitiatited. If you're totally clueless about bookmarklets (I was and probably still am to some extent) figuring out why it wouldn't work for me was damned frustrating - but remember, I am clueless about this stuff. I ended up having to search out (thank you Jesus for Google) other people's bookmarklet scripts and match it up against Rakesh's and see what the heck I was doing wrong. What an adventure! It probably helps to have some knowledge of JavaScript. Eek@me! Anyway, I compared Rakesh's against Freehogg's, as well as Lorelle's and Andrew Beacock's and finally got my Technorati Bookmarklet on my Bookmarks toolbar. Hallelujah!

I had to: copy the script to my URL bar, select all and then drag it to my Bookmarks toolbar, right click on it, change the name to 'Technorati Bookmarklet' - mostly for me to remember what the damn thing was, click 'Add to sidebar' and click 'Save changes'. This means that it sits forever (unless I'm plonka enough to accidentally delete it) on my Bookmarks toolbar and, when it's needed, I simply click it and it pulls up a window to the side of my browser prompting me to 'Enter tags without commas', I click 'OK' and it prepares the script for me to shove in my blog posts. Sooo . . . check out the tag-Technorati posts at the end of this section! YAY ME ;)

Just a reminder that this was created using Mozilla's Firefox browser. The bookmarklet is such a handy little sucker! No idea if it works with IE, had a quick squiz on my IE (I detest working with it) and haven't the foggiest so if you make it work then YAY YOU :)

When I get a bit of time I'll add some screen shots of what the bookmarklet is and how it works. Spotcha :0)

tags: web2.0, learning2.0, Manukau, tag, bookmarklets