Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Cool new tool from Technorati

Hi all,

Technorati has just launched a new tool called "Favorites" where you can create a page with the most recent entries (headlines and excerpts) from your favorite blogs. Sort of like a personalized Food Porn list. You can track up to 50 blogs. I'm in the process of building my favorites list here: http://www.technorati.com/faves/elisebauer if you would like to see an example.

To create a favorites list on Technorati, you need to sign up (it's free) for a membership. Then when you've logged in, at the top of the screen is a link for "Favorites". Click on that to get going. Sometimes adding Typepad blogs can be a little bit difficult. You often need the entire URL, for example, http://www.thefoodsection.com/foodsection not http://www.thefoodsection.com. If you are logged in, you can also review someone else's list of favorites and there is a link that looks like a star symbol that you can click on to add a blog from someone else's list of favorites to your own list.

This Post was written by Elise from Simply Recipes

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Elise thanks for that, but recently I've found Technorati completely useless. Has anyone else found similar? I've tried searching for things that I know it should have listed, and from blogs that have Technorati tags, but it repeatedly fails to pick them up. Hopefully they're improving their service.

Alanna Kellogg said...

I find Technorati funky too, even two of their tech support folks haven't been able to explain why it doesn't catch tags (so I rarely bother) or why they don't ping when the code is supposedly right and why they don't ping when I manually say 'please ping'. I know it's supposed to be magic but so far, the sleight of hand is pretty lame.

Anonymous said...

You should also check out Rollyo, which lets you add a list of your favorite sites to search and then limits your search results to those sites. I find this incredibly useful for recipes, since it means I no longer have to deal with a bunch of random sites that I don't like.

The other cool thing is that you can add your Rollyo search box to your own blog, so that your readers can use your specialized search. I've just added one to cookbook411 if you want to give it a try. The only drawback is that the results get return you to the rollyo site, so I've modified the code a bit to just launch a new window. It would be better if it could somehow just return the results in a way that I could display them on my site, but oh well... you can't have everything.

Alanna Kellogg said...

For anyone who's RSS-impaired, setting up your own 50-blog favorite list is a wonderful option. It's not just a list of blogs, it's a rolling list of the most recent posts from those blogs! It's like a personal FoodPornWatch! (Now if I could only figure out how to get them to ping me ...)

Sheri said...

If you're on a Mac, Safari makes RSS feeds a breeze.