So, just what are these funny coloured little things all over my site? Well, I've been going chicklet widget tags Web 2.0 crazy. It took me ages to get my head wrapped round the point of all these social networking sites. I mean, why don't I just add a bookmark in my browser? My blog's for me, not for you, so why do I have to tag every post? But then I fell in love with del.icio.us big time and suddenly found myself following other people's tags all over the place and, as a big fan of diversions from the actual nitty gritty of work and life, I suddenly found that I couldn't get enough of it all. Then I started to quite like these little buttons. On John Baker's blog, he's got a big slab of colourful buttons at the foot of each post that allow you to add a bookmark to whatever social network site you prefer. And I wanted a piece of that. Trouble is, Mr Baker's a Wordpress user, and they can add these fancy scripts and such at the drop of a hat (I think). Nothing quite so easy for us Blogger neanderthals but, by adapting what you can find on sites such as Top Rank you'll soon find yourself with more little buttons than you know what to do with. So that, added to some Greasemonkey scripts that I have running in Firefox to make it easy for me to add tags easily to blog posts, and far too many hours in the day to spend writing plays and earning money, led me to start mucking about with my template.
The little buttons live on my webspace but if you click on this one 
in the foot of the post it will allow you to bookmark that specific post on del.icio.us, this one 
will do the same at Digg and this one 
leads you towards Furl. Check the sites out and you'll get a feel of what each of them are about. In the interests of not turning the blog into a complete design mess I stuck with the big three, although I might be tempted to add some more in the future.
As for the tags, which are to the right hand side of this little logo 
, they all take you to Technorati, where you will be able to see what other people are writing about the same subject. Given that I'm a bit of an anal idiot, it appears that not many people are writing about the same nonsense at all, although if you follow tags for Larry David or Keith Richards, you'll probably find a lot to keep you entertained.
I also designed some nice buttons to send people to my Myspace, Flickr and LastFM spaces, as well as pointing people towards my dull website and adding a chicklet for the RSS feed for this blog. Sorry if I'm teaching my granny to suck eggs or chicklets here, you probably know more than I do, but there you go, just in case you were wondering. Just click on the buttons and tags - great things can happen.
3 comments:
Very nice; great site. Stopping by here is the closest I get to visiting Hull. Seems like a long time since I lived on Princes Ave.
Nice to know you drop by now and then, John. Cheers for the visit and the button inspiration.
Ha! Good stuff, Dave. Sounds like you're having fun with these chicklet widget bookmark things anyway. I like the sort of functionalist design ethic you have here. If only Blogger could stop its sidebars from plummeting to the depths eh?
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