Yahoo! 360°, as you know, doesn’t have the ability to tag entries as of now. I was wondering if there’s maybe a way I could add tagging to it. And then it struck me: Social Bookmarking!
Any sane social bookmarking site allows you to add a URL and associate a bunch of tags to it; and also has the capability to return a bunch of tags given a URL.
So, yeah, obviously it’s a Greasemonkey script. You get the idea now, I guess. I thought of using Yahoo!’s My Web 2.0 for this, but then there isn’t a push API. del.icio.us turned out to be my ideal candidate — they have post/get APIs, and they use HTTP authentication (which means no complications).
So this is how it works:
The script basically figure out the permalinks and titles of the blog posts, and store then as hidden variables in the forms that you see.
When you 'Add Tags', the permalink gets posted (through a PHP script proxy) as the URL to be bookmarked, and the title gets posted as the description (or the equivalent).
Now when you want to view posts with any tag, I just append a ?tag=foo to the blog URL, and it displays titles of all those posts, pointing to their permalinks.
Let’s take a look at a couple screenshots:
So to add a tag, you need to go to your My Blog page. Adding tags (space-delimited) is pretty straightforward, as you can see in the screenshot above. Now one problem is that I couldn’t find an API in del.icio.us that lets me add tags to an existing bookmarked URL. (I could maybe figure out tags for an existing URL, then add the new tag to the list, delete the URL, and then bookmark again... but, well, that’s too much of a pain.)
That's the same My Blog page when you pass a tag query to it — ?tag=code, in this case.
One thing — and an important one at that — lacking here is that only the logged-in user can make use of the tags. That’s kinda sad, but del.icio.us doesn’t have an API where I can do a tag lookup without requiring authentication information. Once they have such an API, it’d be pretty cool — all you’ll need to do is install (a modified version of) this script, and you’ll be able to see what others have tagged their posts, and browse their posts using tags.
So as of now what this script does is it makes your life easier if you want to categorize your blog posts... for you.
More interestingly, this script demonstrates how to leverage an existing tagging platform (del.icio.us, in this case), and make use of it in an application (Yahoo! 360°, in this case). Of course, using Greasemonkey is not really a solution but, hey, it works!
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