I’ve been adding tags to all of my weblog entries recently. I think it’s a kinda cool thing to do. However, if you’ve been reading my weblog, or even just the RSS version of it, you’ll notice that the tags have been bouncing all around. Well, let me explain the reason for this.
Technorati has set up a system to tag weblog entries. In this way, when I write an entry on “linux”, people can go visit the linux tag on Technorati and see other associated folks who also wrote about Linux. I’ve noticed that it’s added about 80 hits a day to my weblog. Which is pretty impressive.
The basic mechanism is this: somewhere in your weblog when you make a link you include the attribute rel=“tag” in the link element. This can be just a general link to the Technorati tag page or to anything else. I’ve chosen to go the simple route and just link to the technorati tag page, although if I ever finish time suck, it will link to my unified tag page for my weblog, photos, bookmarks, and articles. So the simple way to do this is to include a span of HTML like technorati. This puts the link there and when Technorati recrawls my page it grabs the links.
Sounds all good and straight forward, but there is a catch. Apparently there
is a flaw in the technorati spider (as confirmed by Kevin Marks in IRC). Basically, it’s associating my tags with
the wrong articles, which is most uncool. This is difficult to understand as if it’s grabbing my RSS feed there is no way this should be happening because the
different tags are in different