Like other folks I’ve been trying to figure out how to do something with Technorati’s new Tags feature. My blogging software — blogger — doesn’t seem to innovate anymore, so I probably won’t see an integration with Tags anytime soon in my blogging software.

So, I was trying to think of a way I could easily insert Technorati tags into posts without having to type them up each time. My first idea was to create a bookmarklet that would work like the following:

• I type up my blog entry in blogger’s textarea/editor.
• At the end of the post, I enter in the tags I want to apply as a space separated list of tokens, e.g., (without the quotes, on it’s own line), “ideas blogging tags technorati”.
• I highlight the tags I typed in, and click the “TagItUp!” bookmarklet.
• The TagItUp! bookmarklet takes the highlighted text, and transforms each into a Tecnorati Tag, and overwrites the highlighted text with this new HTML.
• So, now, in the blogger editor window, I have my post up top, and at the bottom I have a chunk of tag HTML along the lines of:

  <p class="tags">Tags:
  <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/ideas" rel="tag">ideas</a>,
  <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/blogging" rel="tag">blogging</a>,
  <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/tags" rel="tag">tags</a>,
  <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/technorati" rel="tag">technorati</a>.</p>
  

• See the bottom of this post for how it’d look.

(The <p> makes sure it’s offset at the bottom, and also allows you to apply a CSS style (tags) to it so that you can go into your CSS and make it smaller, hidden, or however you want it rendered.)

I don’t know JavaScript well enough for the time I want to spent developing that bookmarlet. I timeboxed myself at 1/2 an hour and just got frustrated with how slow the code/build cycle was.

Are there and JavaScript wizards out there who can whip the above out?

Update: of course, I should have figured someone else would have already coded up something like this.
The bookmarklet doesn’t behave exactly like I outlined above (it uses alert windows instead of highlighted text, and you have to cut-n-paste the HTML it renderes), but I tell you what, it’s good enough! I’d still like the highlighting then inserting functionality: it’d cut out the two steps of filling out the tags in the popup and then pasting them into my post.

Tags:
ideas,
blogging,
tags,
technorati.