Reworked tagmaker script

Posted by Shane Becker on 2006-09-20 at 7:46pm
<p>For a long time, I've been using tags on this blog to show a kind of keywords or categories to describe a post. I've been using an AppleScript for MarsEdit called Tag Maker written by <a href="http://garrickvanburen.com/tagmaker/">Garrick Van Buren</a>. The way his script works is that when you have a word selected in MarsEdit and select his script it adds a few links in parentheses after the word. Running the script on "MarsEdit" would give you:</p>

<code>MarsEdit &lt;em&gt; (&lt;!--// Technorati START //--&gt; &lt;a href="http://www.Technorati.com/tags/MarsEdit" rel="tag"&gt; t&lt;/a&gt; &lt;!--// Technorati END //--&gt;  &lt;!--// DELICIOUS START //--&gt; &lt;a href="http://del.icio.us/tags/MarsEdit" rel="tag"&gt; d&lt;/a&gt; &lt;!--// DELICIOUS END //--&gt;  &lt;!--// Flickr START //--&gt; &lt;a href="http://Flickr.com/photos/tags/MarsEdit" rel="tag"&gt; f&lt;/a&gt; &lt;!--// Flickr END //--&gt; )&lt;/em&gt; </code>

<p>which would look like this MarsEdit <em>(<!--// Technorati START //--><a href="http://www.Technorati.com/tags/MarsEdit" rel="tag">t</a><!--// Technorati END //--> <!--// DELICIOUS START //--><a href="http://del.icio.us/tags/MarsEdit" rel="tag">d</a><!--// DELICIOUS END //--> <!--// Flickr START //--><a href="http://Flickr.com/photos/tags/MarsEdit" rel="tag">f</a><!--// Flickr END //-->)</em>. The Flickr code I added to his script then submitted that and keyboard shortcut instructions back to him. He released an updated version that included both changes. Very cool, that was my first patch submitted to anything.</p>

<p>After some time using it I started to notice three things. 1: I was getting lots of questions about what the <em>(t, d, f)</em> was all about. 2: No one was clicking on any of those single letter links. 3: My blog wasn't coming up in the Technorati index as posting anything about anything. After a while I realized that the word that I'm linking is as important to where I'm linking it to. So by that logic any post that I used this script on was telling Technorati that i was writing about the letter 'T'. Ugh. Not good.</p>

<p>I've been meaning to change the script again so that the word that I have selected gets the link around it linking only to Technorati. Since del.icio.us and Flickr don't really do anything with incoming links. I finally made those changes today on a 737 flying from Seattle to Baltimore stopping in Kansas City. I sit on the floor in front of gate 38 waiting to sit on another 737 to take me to see my girlfriend.</p>

<p>The changes / simplification I made to Garrick's script could just as easily be made for Flickr, del.icio.us or any other tag name space. I just don't really care about those. The modified version of the script outputs this markup now:</p>

<code>
  <pre>
    &lt;a href="http://www.technorati.com/tags/MarsEdit" rel="tag"&gt;MarsEdit&lt;/a&gt;
  </pre>
</code>

<p>I'll clean up my code and comments and post the Apple Script here, too.</p>

  

        
  [...] If you’re using my TagMaker script with MarsEdit, shaners 0 matic 8000 posted a patch for better Technorati placement: Reworked tagmaker script. [...]