Spring Cleaning

I spent a little time today starting to spruce up the format of this blog. So far, I haven't modified anything notable about the entries yet, though I'm going to. Hopefully, later this week.

What I did today was wire up search and a subject index using Technorati. Key topics are now in the subject archive, and there's a technorati search dialog. The basic Technorati embed script completely mangled the site layout, so I extracted the text it was trying to add to the site and dropped it into the sidebar, with a little cleanup.

By default, they don't build a subject index, of course. But it was easy enough to embed one, using their standard search format for searching on a specific site. To add a subject index for this site on the topic "CSS", I simply added a link to

http://www.technorati.com/search/CSS? from=http://listeningtoreason.blogspot.com

as you can see on the right of this page.

It turned out to be really easy, despite the fact that as far as I can tell, Technorati has absolutely no help on their site for embedding their tools manually. I know they don't want to confuse people when they can just use javascript to embed it themselves, but it's still bizarre that there's no information there about it (that I can find, anyway).

Note: at the moment I have it performing a general search on the text. In the future, I may just have it reference the tag, instead.

Which brings me to the rest of the spring cleaning: adding tags and semantics. There aren't a whole lot of entries here so far, which is awfully nice, since I need to edit them all. Hopefully I can get everything converted this week.

I'm going to switch from the current awful entry markup to using proper HTML semantics for the entries. That should make the blog a lot more accessible, though I'll test things when I'm done to make sure that's really the case.

I'm also going to add tags to all the entries, so they're properly indexed. This is the first entry I've tried tags with. I also need to style the tags properly, so they don't look like the rest of the text.

Finally, I'm going to convert the book reviews to the hReview microformat. I want to try it out and see how it works.

Tags: blogging, hReview, microformats, search, technorati