A Consuming Experience: Technorati: favorite blogs; help others add your blog

Sunday 26 February 2006

Technorati: favorite blogs; help others add your blog

(If you've read my previous post you can ignore this post - here's why I'm posting this extract from the previous post. This post has the code for the different buttons to add a blog to a reader's Technorati favorites.)

If you've not yet heard, the blogosphere search engine Technorati have recently introduced a "Favorite blogs" feature. Only Technorati members who are logged in can add favorite blogs (limit of 50), but anyone in the world can view others' favorites, e.g. see Technorati's selected bloggers' favorites, and my own favorites page (which I've just started compiling).

This post is an introduction or tutorial on Technorati's Favorite Blogs feature, for both bloggers and those who read blogs, with some howtos. In this guide I'll first give the code to insert in your blog template to help others easily add your blog to their Technorati Favorites while viewing your blog (see the new button at the top of my pages?), then (in a separate post now) mention the benefits of Favorites for those who read blogs, and give some general thoughts about Technorati favorites.

Help Technorati members favorite your blog

Yep, "favorite" is a new verb, at least according to Technorati's favorites help page!

If you're a Technorati member, once you're logged in you can access a page with code for buttons (that link just takes you to a sign in page if you're not signed in or not a member). The page is customised for your blog URL so you can just click in the box with the code for the button you want, then copy and paste into your template - but remember to choose the right blog from the dropdown list first, if you have more than one blog. It looks like this, and as you can see they've offered quite a few choices of buttons or just text (see mine at the top of my blog):

However, even if you're not a Technorati member you can still hack your template to add the code/buttons or a text link, see below. The buttons all relate to my own blog for illustration, but the code below can be copied/pasted exactly as is if you're on Blogger and it will work for your own blog URL - if you're not on Blogger, just change <$BlogURL$> in the code to the URL of your blog (you can leave out the "http://" if you wish, it seems to make no difference with or without, it's easier without):

Code:

<a href="http://technorati.com/faves?add=<$BlogURL$>"><img src="http://static.technorati.com/pix/fave/tech-fav-0.gif" alt="Add to Technorati Favorites!" /></a>

Code:

<a href="http://technorati.com/faves?add=<$BlogURL$>"><img src="http://static.technorati.com/pix/fave/tech-fav-1.gif" alt="Add to Technorati Favorites!" /></a>

Code:

<a href="http://technorati.com/faves?add=<$BlogURL$>"><img src="http://static.technorati.com/pix/fave/tech-fav-2.gif" alt="Add to Technorati Favorites!" /></a>

Code:

<a href="http://technorati.com/faves?add=<$BlogURL$>"><img src="http://static.technorati.com/pix/fave/tech-fav-3.gif" alt="Add to Technorati Favorites!" /></a>

Code:

<a href="http://technorati.com/faves?add=<$BlogURL$>"><img src="http://static.technorati.com/pix/fave/tech-fav-4.gif" alt="Add to Technorati Favorites!" /></a>

Add to Technorati Favorites!
Code:
<a href="http://technorati.com/faves?add=<$BlogURL$>">Add to Technorati Favorites!</a>

Of course with the last one you can just change the link text to anything you like, e.g. "Add this blog to Technorati favorites".