They really do! I know, because I have been trying to keep up with their pace, updating a user script that adds some features to Blogger that Blogger do not yet provide themselves, in this case tagging functionality. The container keeping the optional additional Title and Link fields on top of the Blogger editor (and the Tags field, when running my script), for instance, has been called "titles", "otherFields" and now "titleAndUrlFields" in different times and pages where the Blogger post editor has been featured. This is a very Greasemonkey unfriendly practice. The Google Reader people at least try to be user script friendly, and explicitly try to not to change node id:s without good reason.
Such caution helps third parties such as myself and Jasper (who wrote the original script I based mine on, before it exploded in features) to innovate around your product, adding value to your present users at no cost to you. But try to keep your sideshow helpers busy doing new good things rather than overcoming additional forward compatibility hurdles you fling out once in a while, and all will be happier in the end. Much thanks to Jasper's continuing development of his own script, I toddled along now too, but it gets old pretty quickly. I want to add native trackback support to Blogger, not make things that used to work fine keep working fine -- and within weeks of the time I embraced and extended some feature the first time too, at that.
Anyway, the script (original post here) is updated to cater the changed BlogThis! page, and thanks to some other user feedback earlier today, I also fixed a few old bugs of mine. It's quite possible the script works with the ftp publication mode now, too, and not only the Blogger hosted mode of publishing, as before. Do tell if it does or not; I don't have any test setup myself.
Regarding tagging Blogger posts, I didn't notice until today that Greg had drawn up a great site around his FreshTags system for blog navigation based on Del.icio.us tags. Maybe there was never any commotion around it, and maybe I just missed it somehow. I'll be sure to peek at it, though, as there are still a few misfeatures left to weed out in my own version.
Pardon the general rantiness of this post, by the way, but doing monotonous tasks void of creativity does not rank high on my quality-time-o-meter, and if the time spent gets flushed down the drain every once in a while, it does not get any better either. It is in times like this I have another peek at Wordpress, surveying the options.
Present findings, for the curious: Wordpress themselves host blogs where template tweaking is limited to picking one in eight templates, one in five colors, one in eight header background images and switching six sidebar options on and off. It's great for an average non-geek, and the rest of you want to go to BlogSome, where you may tweak the templates to your heart's content, besides browsing among some useful plugins on offer too.
Neither host seems to have the functionally well worked-through, standardized and user script friendly templates Blogger does though, which is one area where Blogger really excels as a blogging platform today. Some Wordpress templates both habe comment permalinks and shows links to them, which is something I believe all present Blogger template choices do, but far from all, and there is unfortunately no de facto naming convention imposed on new users.
#c plus eighteen digits might not be a particularly pretty convention, but it is very effective, and so would the #comment-N slightly-convention not seldom seen on Wordpress blogs be if it was burned in as a default choice. Especially if these links were also shown to visitors.Your CommentBlogging visitors will thank you.
Hey... No peeking!! (but seriously, the good Freshtags stuff is coming soon...)
ReplyDeleteThanks for the updated script!! I didn't realise the wheel had been reinvented & the whole thing needed to be rejigged. I appreciate your efforts & will be reinstalling / upgrading forthwith.
hey!
ReplyDeleteim having a little trouble implementing Freshtags! the tags are not appearing on the site at all! my blog is at
http://adityavm.blogspot.com
could you see where i'm going wrong? thanks!
I think we should be taking John's hint about this, and wait for the (most likely) forthcoming article on Freshblog about how to go about this. It's quite possible the code isn't fully packaged and ready to go yet, and John and Greg both are usually very thorough about how to go about doing things in their tutorials. My best advice is hence to wait for it some more.
ReplyDeletek! will do!
ReplyDeletegreat work here with the blog! good place for information :D
keep it up!
script works flawlessly, plus i see that most of old bugs are now fixed
ReplyDeletethanks!
I was using your free-form date field script a while back, but it stopped working. (I have a need for pre-1990 dates.)
ReplyDeleteNow that I read this posting of yours, I think I understand why it doesn't work, but I don't know enough to fix it.
Do you plan to update the script to work with Blogger's current code?
I wasn't planning to (until maybe in the event of needing it again myself), but chances just increased astronomically. Which mostly means it might happen in the next few weeks or so at present carrot levels; I got quite sick of debugging code supposed to already work when I retraced the Blogger dance yesterday.
ReplyDeleteI think that you are right. I am still testing this script.
ReplyDeleteNice blog, bye.
I publish at blogger.com via ftp and your script has always worked except it seemed to stop working this week. Everything remained the same in the blogger editor but the tags didn't appear at my blog. It was working on 1/26 but not tonight. I got the upgrade from here and now it works again although the interface changed. It used to offer three options in dialog boxes that I would OK - now those have gone away.
ReplyDeleteI've never been able to configure the link to del.icio.us that appears after publishing. I figured that might be due to using ftp.
Thanks for the great script. I find it very helpful and your tips on how to tinker with the CSS have helped too.
I'm using email to post entry. For photos, via email-flickr-blog. Is there a way I could add tags thru email? Thanks.
ReplyDeleteMy best tip would be to end posts with a few links (to tag some tagging site, or search engine) with the rel=tag attribute, much like this tool does. That would let Technorati pick up the tags, though it won't add them to your Del.icio.us account.
ReplyDeleteecmanaut - I'm using your Userscript for Blogger, trying to get the del.iciou.us tags I've fashioned to become usable at the bottom of a post I make. But when I bring up the blog's frontpage (a/p the blog-entry's individual page) I'm now getting the list of the blue-lined tags I've selected. But, when I click on a tag, I don't get my del.icio.us set for that tag, I get a Yahoo page marked Error 404, and instructions to check my URL in each case for correct capitalization and spelling of tags. Well, I went back and re-did all my tags, getting rid of all capitals. My spelling is correct and in exact parallel with the spelling of my tag/s it/themselves. Why is Yahoo intruding? How can I get rid of it? If I put a Yahoo URL amaong the excludes on the appropriate Userscript in your Greasemonkey ((I have three of your Userscripts), which Yahoo URL do I put in the excludes box?
ReplyDeleteAs my own Delicious links seem to work I can't tell what's wrong with yours unless you give me an URL to a page of yours that exhibits the problem.
ReplyDeleteecmanaut - Thanks!, Johan, for answering and inviting me to have you take a look. Blogger blogname: refWrite. URL: http://anaximaximum.blogspot.com
ReplyDeleteI use a handful of brandnames for different kinds of blog entries there, but the official "editor" is "Owlb," short for "Owlbird," pun on "Albert." You will also find "Politicarp" there, and his posts are the ones I'm concentrating on for deli tags to test the possiblities. You may not like the politics which are outspokenly left, right and center as the subject matters from my idiosyncratic perspective and voracious news-monitoring–but hey .... (hold your nose?).
Any help you can give, especially in the specific matter of why Yahoo intrudes and tells me my tags are unsuitable to it, therefore Error 404; would be most appreciated and a learning move on my part.
Yours from Semaphore and the gang
I have only recently begun to try out tags, after joining CoComment
It appears that, while you link to http://del.icio.us/refWrite/ for your tags, you have forgotten to register a Del.icio.us user by that name ("refWrite"), hence the URLs come out 404s. Or maybe you are actually logged in as a Del.icio.us user by some other name, in which case you should reconfigure the Blogger Publish Helper to link to that URL instead. (This is accomplished by clicking the "Tags:" title and reanswering the questions.)
ReplyDelete