The last time we blogged, you were introduced to the wonders of blogside search. It's now released to all TypePad users and we've expanded the search index. In addition to titles, posts, pages and comments, we've added keywords and Technorati tags. If you're like me, your eyes lit up when you read the word "tags". If you're not, I'm happy to explain.
By indexing tags, bloggers using advanced templates will be able to send tag links to a search page on their TypePad blog instead of sending readers to Technorati. The best part is that it's an easy template change. I'll take you through it step-by-step.
1. Navigate to your blog's "Design" tab in the dashboard and click on "Templates" under "CUSTOMIZE YOUR CURRENT DESIGN".
2. Assuming you have the default templates, open the "Main Index" template and find this block of code (it'll be in there twice, for the sticky post and regular posts):
<MTEntryIfTagged><!-- technorati tags -->
<p class="entry-footer-tags">
<a href="http://www.<$MTTechnoratiDomain$>/search/<$MTEntryPermalink$>" title="<$MTTrans phrase="Find related items at Technorati."$>"><$MTTrans phrase="Technorati Tags"$></a>:
<MTEntryTags glue=", "><a href="http://<$MTTechnoratiDomain$>/tag/<$MTTagLabelClean encode_url="1"$>" rel="tag"><$MTTagLabel$></a></MTEntryTags>
</p>
</MTEntryIfTagged>
If you're using your own template code, look for the section that outputs tags.
3. You'll want to replace the code from step 2 with this:
<MTEntryIfTagged><!-- technorati tags -->
<p class="entry-footer-tags">
<$MTTrans phrase="Tags"$>:
<MTEntryTags glue=", "><a href="<MTSearchResultsURL>?filter.q=<$MTTagLabel$>" rel="tag"><$MTTagLabel$></a></MTEntryTags>
</MTEntryIfTagged>
4. Save changes on the template. Provided you are using the default templates, you'll need to make the change again on all of your entry listing templates (Category Archives, DateBased Archives, Individual Archives and Search Results).
5. If you haven't, add some tags to your posts!
6. Open up your browser and check out your beautiful, new tag links.
So you can see this in action, I've set up a sample blog to show off the feature. Here's a link to all of the posts tagged "food".
One of the caveats: since blogside search indexes more than just tags, if you have written the word "food" in any entry, regardless of how you've tagged it, those entries will appear in this list.
I hope this demo has inspired you to start playing around with your advanced template sets a bit. Please post any interesting uses of blogside search in the comments. We'd love to see what how you're using it!
