I have updated my inline comments form hack to be compatible with coComment. Note that if you have the comments forms visible on your main and archive pages like I do there will still be a problem there, but on item pages the values will be filled it and the coComment detector automatically invoked.

shortText.com is a site with an interesting purpose — to post any text. Plain text only (which is nice for posting code) this site seems free and unlimited. Just enter your text in the box and click the button. A (rather random) URL is generated as a permalink to your content (example) and then you can send that URL to anyone. For those of use who run blog(s) this isn’t all that useful — after all, most content we want to post should make sense on one of our blogs, but it could be very useful to people who just want a one-time (or a few-time) publishing of something quickly and don’t want to bother with an account registration process.

Yes, I know, another post on a Ning app of mine. Wrinks is an app for the creation/management of webrings, blogrings, linkrolls, and blogrolls. Ring/roll creators have full power over what sites are members of their wrink and wrinks can be embedded in web pages using either JavaScript or PHP (depending on your hosting situation) as either webrings or blogrolls. The service aims at being a sort of ‘social blogrolling’ system. The first person to add a site to the system has control over that site’s metadata (title, description, feedurl, etc.).

Traffic data is stored for each Wrink and wrinks can be browsed by tag, sorted by traffic number. These lists of wrinks can be syndicated via either RSS 2.0 or JSON(P). Each wrink can also be retreived via JSON(P) for custom inclusion in webpages.

Wrink rolls can also be filtered by tag. Each site on a roll has tags, and if &tag= is passed to the wrink, only sites matching that tag (or tag intersection) are returned. This opens the way for the possibility of filtering blogrolls by tag.

No, it’s not a new service provided by Google — it’s a Ning app built on the Google Search API. The functionality is simple. You feed Google Related Pages a URL, and it gives you back a list of related webpages. The data is collected using Google’s ‘related:’ operator. I have found in tests that it gets pretty good results when used on popular pages, but not as well when used on less popular ones.

So what is the point? Why use this instead of just doing a ‘related:’ search on Google? Isn’t this just a nicer interface to something we could already do? Not quite. You see the app also generates RSS 2.0 and JSON(P) feeds of the results. Ultimately that is the point. Results can be integrated into pages, such as blog sidebars, or watched in feedreaders. Because the data is all in the Ning app, other formats will be easy enough to add if people want them.

This post has been ‘deprecated’. Please see FreshTags-Singpolyma 2

I have for some time had my own version of the FreshTags system. In the past, all upgrades to this version have been seamless to the user, but this time the changes were too radical to allow that to work. I have rewritten the entire hack based off of the FreshTags v0.5 code. The major changes from FreshTags 0.5 are:

• Hidden post page is used for displaying tags, instead of reloading the current page and displaying in the sidebar (the primary purpose of the original modifications)
• Completely asynchronous data load — FreshTags no longer loads before the page content, but rather loads afterwards, resulting in a faster page load time
• If no tag is selected one can be automatically pulled from relTag data on the page
• Full support for peek-a-boo headlines in blogrolls

Please Note : If you are upgrading from my previous hack, you will need to remove all of its code from your template before upgrading. You will also have to edit the Tags post.

Basic Installation Instructions

1. Create a new post on the blog you would like to implement this hack on with the title ‘Tags’ and click the ‘Edit Html’ tab for the post body, pasting the exact code ‘<div id=”freshtags_postpage”><i>Loading…</i></div>’ into the post body. Turn comments off for the post and set the post date to January 1, 2000. The time doesn’t matter. Post this post. (If you are upgrading from the previous version, just edit the post to contain the new code.)
2. Edit the template for your blog and insert this code into the <head> section:
   <script type=”text/javascript”>
   //<![CDATA[
   var del_user = “delicious username“;
   var anchor = “anchor tag“;
   var defs = “”;
   var maxposts = 10;
   var freshtags_tags_id = “freshtags_tags”;
   var freshtags_posts_id = “freshtags_posts”;
   var freshtags_postpage_id = “freshtags_postpage”;
   //]]>
   </script>
   <script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://jscripts.ning.com/get.php?xn_auth=no&amp;id=818185

   Where ‘delicious username’ is the del.icio.us username you store your blog data in and ‘anchor tag’ is the anchor tag you use (if you use one). If you don’t use an anchor tag, just replace the words ‘anchor tag’ with nothing.

3. Insert this code where you would like the tags drop-down to go:
   <div id=”freshtags_tags”><i>Loading…</i></div>
   <div id=”freshtags_posts”></div>
4. Save your template and republish your blog

Customisation Options

• no_autocapture — setting this variable to true will keep the script from attempting to grab relTag data from the page. For example, to keep a Blogger blog using this script from grabbing relTag data when on the main page use <MainPage><script type=”text/javascript”>var no_autocapture = true;</script></MainPage>
• defs — setting this variable sets what tag(s) will be selected be default if the user has not selected any. This will do nothing if no_autocapture is not set to true unless the autocapture failes.
• maxposts — the maximum number of posts to display in the sidebar
• freshtags_tags_id — the ID of the block to put the tags dropdown in
• freshtags_posts_id — the ID of the block to put the posts list
• freshtags_postpage_id — the ID of the block in the Tags post
• freshtags_tag_format — the format for the tags list (default is ‘drop-add’). For example, to use asynchronous post loading add this code to your template: <script type=”text/javascript”>var freshtags_tag_format = “drop-add-async”;</script>

Peek-A-Boo Blogroll Headlines
To add peek-a-boo headlines to your blogrolls follow the following steps:

1. Add this code to the <head> section of your blog to facilitate the actual show/hide:
   <script type=”text/javascript”>
   //<![CDATA[
   function toggleitem(postid,linkid,newtxt,displaytype) {
   if(!displaytype) {displaytype = ‘block’;}
   var whichpost = document.getElementById(postid);
   if (whichpost.style.display != “none”) {
   whichpost.style.display = “none”;
   } else {
   whichpost.style.display = displaytype;
   }
   if(linkid) {
   var lnk = document.getElementById(linkid);
   lnk.href = “javascript:toggleitem(‘”+postid+”‘,'”+linkid+”‘,'”+lnk.innerHTML+”‘);”;
   lnk.innerHTML = newtxt;
   }
   }
   //]]>
   </script>
2. Add this code just after the blogroll link you want to add peek-a-boo headlines for (it’s invisible defaultly, just the container for the headlines) ‘<div id=”blognameheadlines” style=”display:none;”><i>Loading…</i></div>‘
3. If this blog stores post data in del.icio.us (they don’t have to use FreshTags necessarily) add this code just before the blogroll link (it’s the +/- link for showing/hiding the headlines):

   <a id=”blognamelink” href=”javascript:toggleitem(‘blognameheadlines’,’blognamelink’,’-‘); load_otherblog_titles(‘del.icio.us’,’other blog’s del.icio.us account username‘,’other blog’s anchor tag (if they use one)‘,’URL to other blog’s feed (optional)‘,’blognameheadlines’);”>+</a>

   Otherwise add this code to use just their feed:

   <a id=”blognamelink” href=”javascript:toggleitem(‘blognameheadlines’,’blognamelink’,’-‘); load_otherblog_titles(‘feed’,”,”,’URL to other blog’s feed‘,’blognameheadlines’);”>+</a>