Tagging and Trackbacks
Add more visibility to your blog – Tagging and Trackbacks
Tagging:
Tagging is a new phenomenon started by del.icio.us and Flickr several years ago, and accelerated by Technorati and IceRocket. Tags are like categories or keywords, but are different in at least two ways:
- Tags are visible and actionable by readers. Categories and Keywords are often hidden from view, so users hardly ever "use" them
- Tags are bottom-up information architecture. Categories have to be defined before being used, and because so few users enter Keywords, search engines can't made good use of them. For many systems, Tags can also be added by readers as well, so that IA grows organically as numerous readers add their own organization to content.
Adding tags using Contribute is very simple. When the user enters a tag in the tag field for a blog entry, Contribute creates a tag link along with providing you the WYSIWYG editing experience of the blog entry. After the user publishes the entry and clicks the tag link, a list appears in the embedded browser showing all the blog entries indexed by the tag repository using the same tag.
When you create or edit a blog entry in the Pages panel, you can enter as many tags as you want for the entry, separated by commas.
In Contribute you can control the placement of the tags in your blog entry, and allow you to label tags with prefix. Also you can specify your tag repositories and set your default tag repository.
Trackbacks:
Trackback URLs are used to maintain a list of other blogs that are linked to your blog entry. To link to one of your blog entries, other blog authors add that blog entry’s trackback URLs to their blog entry. Your blog maintains a record of these linked blog entries for each of your blog entries. When you create a blog entry, you can add one or more trackback URLs to it. Also you can prevent other users from adding your blog’s trackback URL to their blog entries by disabling the Allow Trackback option in the Contribute toolbar.
You can set preference to determine whether trackback is enabled for blog entries. Some blogs don’t support the trackback feature or require you to set a preference to allow it.
Once you allow track back and publish the entry, it will display the trackback URL for tracking.
You can add this trackback URL to you entry, by clicking “Trackbacks” button in the Contribute toolbar or through Insert-->Trackbacks menu.
Which will through an dialog for adding trackbacks URL. Enter the trackback URL for the blog entry in the Trackback URL(s) field, and then click OK.
Contribute adds the URLs to the blog entry, and the Trackbacks field appears at the bottom of the Contribute workspace. You can add, edit, or delete trackback URLs in this field. These modifications are also reflected in the Trackbacks dialog box.
Publish the entry. It might be required to go to the typepad account for approval of trackbacks.
