Recently Filed in Blogging

RSS icons

By Ann on June 28, 2006 10:54 AM

I've been seeing the nice orange RSS icons everywhere, and wanted one to replace the plain text TypePad uses by default. With a little Googling, I found http://feedicons.com/. They've done a really nice job packaging this up, with multiple sizes of the icons and instructions on how to change the color if orange doesn't do it for you.

For anyone on TypePad, here's the code I used to get the icon to appear with no border and to pick up the subhead style for the word "Subscribe". Adjust icon dimensions based on the one you end up using.

<div class="module-syndicate module">
<h2 class="module-header" style="margin-bottom: 15px"><a href="http://[yourblog]/index.rdf"><img src="[youriconpath]" border="0" height="32" width="32" style="border: 0px"> Subscribe</a>
</h2>
</div>

Now I need to stop playing with my blogs and bill some hours! ;-)

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Technorati tag generator

By Ann on June 26, 2006 8:44 AM

Update: TypePad has added Technorati tags to their software. On the composition page, click Customize the display of this page and you can turn it on.

I looked around for a tag generator and didn't find one that did exactly what I wanted, so I built one. It will let you:

  • Keep track of the tags you use (up to 50)
  • Open tag links in the same window or a new one
  • Set text/paragraph formatting
  • Change the opening text "Tags" and delimiter between tags

All you do is put an "x" next to the tags you want in a particular post and copy the code it generates for the paragraph. Since I can't write ASP or Perl to save my life it's in a spreadsheet, but should be cross-platform.

Please let me know if something needs tweaking or if you find it useful!

If you want to muck around with the basic formulas yourself, first un-hide all the columns and rows as there are a few layers of If and Concatenate statements due to working around Excel limits.

For anyone wondering why I bothered with this when Technorati picks up my TypePad categories as tags, it's because the two serve very different purposes in my blogs. I use categories to organize posts when someone is within the sites, while with the tags I'm trying to capture more terms to match what people might be searching with. More of the whys—as well as a video demonstrating tags in Technorati—can be found at Rich Brooks' Flyte blog.

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