It is reccomended that you use the new del.icio.us, pinging, AND trackback script. This one may still work, but I no longer actively support it.

Blogger has no native trackback capabilities. While trackback is a wonderful tool, it can sometimes just be too much of a pain for Blogger users. After all, you just went to the work of writing a wonderful post, who wants to bother making a hop over to Haloscan afterwards to send trackbacks to others? With the advent of the semi-automatic Backlinks we seem to be ever less inclined to make the extra hop.

Now, the extra hop can be a thing of the past. Install the Blogger Trackback Userscript and get trackback functionality directly from your Blogger dashboard! Every time you publish a post, the script harvests the title, permalink, and post excerpt (as well as blog title) and then displays a form on the ‘post complete’ page for trackbacks. Enter the trackback URLs one at a time and hit enter. The trackbacks will be completed AJAXially.

Much thanks to Johan’s Blogger del.icio.us helper script which facilitated much of the code for this script.

Possible Future Features

1. Support for autodiscovery trackback RDF so that one can enter simply the post URL for a trackback and not have to use the full trackback URL
2. Optionally try auto-trackbacking to all posts linked to from the post

Most of us are aware of the problem. If I tag this post ‘web2.0’ and you monitor Technorati for the tag ‘web20’ then we’re sunk. You’ll never find me. If I tag a webpage on del.icio.us as ‘hacks’ and you monitor the page for ‘hack’, you may never see it. These tags are virtually synonymous, but a computer can’t tell that.

Enter Tagging, a new Ning app designed to solve this very problem. The app stores groups of virtually synonymous tags (or TagGroups) that are defined by the community and provides easy access to them via both XOXO and JSON(P) APIs. With space to clearly define and describe TagGroups and a coComment catch-all discussion system the community solves their own problem by defining for the system what tags mean the same thing.

For more information see the Tagging About Page.

Yurnet is a search engine with an interesting model — search for things instead of in places. If you want to search for DVDs, but don’t know what engine to use to do that, you could search Google for an appropriate engine, then search that engine, or just go to Yurnet and pick ‘dvd’.

Yurnet takes awhile to get your head around. That’s because at first it looks like a cheesy metasearch engine. If you’re still thinking search where it seems almost rediculous. Which is faster : going to Google Images and searching for what you want or going to Yurnet, picking Google Images, and searching? The answer is they’re basically the same. After corrospondence back and forth to the site creator, however, I finally came to understand that the real point of Yurnet is search what for when you don’t know what site to search.

That said, the site is rather ugly. The final resolved URL is http://ww2.yurnet.com:8080/ — not exactly something that looks pretty in bookmarks. The drop-down select box is a mélange of capitalization schemes, and the ‘vs’ searches (which really are out of the scope of the site) are listed first, giving an initial illusion that alphabetical order is not preserved. Also, some things are listed as wheres still (ie Google Image). Realistically the box should be cleaned up to use the same capitalization schemes throughout and be only a list of whats in alphabetical order, without engine names and the like getting in the way.

PurpleMoggy has created a set of instructions for using this on Blogger BETA. I have updated my hack to support his new features and fix the bugs he found. There is also now a new ‘no image’ image.

Awhile back I wrote a post detailing my hack for adding profile photos to comments. Unfortunately that post was rather technical in its explanation. This post attempts to deal with adding the hack to your blog in a more user-friendly fashion and also with using the hack to highlight blog-contributor comments.

Step 1 – The first thing you need to do is find the comment section in your blog template. Edit your template and scroll down until you find the <BlogItemComments> tag. The code inside should look something like this:

Step 2 – If you plan to use comment highlighting (so that the comments made by blog authors look different from those of users) this must be wrapped in another tag so that all of the code for each comment is in one tag. Like so:

Some blog templates will already have a tag around their comments, as will those using the ‘standard’ comment markup. If you have one of those templates just write down the class of the wrapping tag or add one (the underlined section above).

Step 3 – Next we need the class of the element where we can look for the link to the author. In the example code above this would be comment-poster. When in doubt use the class of the overall wrapping tag. Once you have it, write it down. Count the number of <a> tags there are before the <$BlogCommentAuthor$> tag and write this number down (in the above example it is 1).

Step 4 – The only thing left to do in this part of the code is to insert the element where the profile photo will go. Add this code right before the <$BlogCommentBody$> tag: <div class=”commentphoto”></div>

Step 5 – Now go to the <head> section of your blog and add the following code:

Where class of author wrapper is the class you wrote down in step 3, the # of a tags is the number you wrote down in step 3, and the main wrapper class is the class you wrote down in step 2. If you are not going to use comment highlighting the last for parameters can be left off (from main wrapper class to highlighted tex background) otherwise you have to fill in the color you with the text and background of highlighted comments to be in their appropriate spots above.

Step 6 – Save and Republish!

Well this is a bit of a different-style post for me, but this discovery struck me as extremely useful and so I thought I’d share it with any of my readers who may not have seen it yet.

On the transition to Windows XP I was horrified to discover that the ’emergency boot disk’ that XP creates cannot read NTFS partitions. It boots to MSDOS7.0 and then if your computer is NTFS you can do nothing. This essentially destroyed any chance of accessing your data if you could not boot to Windows. Many times during computer repair this was a hindrance and either elaborate workarounds had to be devised, or I fell back to the cure-all ‘reformat and reinstall’.

Yesterday I tried to get cheap Excel, but discovered an incredibly useful tool from Microsoft in an incredibly obvious place: the Windows XP install CD. If you boot from the CD and press ‘R’ at the ‘Welcome to Setup’ screen you are taken to the Windows XP Recovery Console. This is exactly what I had been looking for for so long: a reformulation of MSDOS that can access NTFS partitions! I was able to use it to run CHKDSK (scandisk seems to be out) and fix the minor problem the drive had — saving potentially hours of work to fix the problem any other way. There are even some XP-centric commands for dealing with user accounts etc.

What this does not help is users of many preinstalled systems, especially laptops. Most (if not all) of the ‘restore disks’ sent with such systems do not have the Recovery Console. However, techies who have a copy of the install disks can use their copy to run the Recovery Console on another person’s system. No activation procedure 😉 Even XP Professional install disks’ Console will work just fine with XP Home systems 🙂