We launched new forums in March 2019—join us there. In a hurry for help with your website? Get Help Now!
MODX Community Forums Archive

[solved] How to set up a Blog?

    • 14557
    • 48 Posts
    johnvb Reply #1, 20 years, 2 months ago
    I’ve been working on my wife’s blog using Modx: www.specialfamilies.org/blog.html. She has recently "claimed" it on Technorati, but the only post it seems to have picked up contains all the news stuff on the left of the template. - see http://www.technorati.com/blogs/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.specialfamilies.org%2Fblog.html.

    Does anyone know how technorati works? How do you tell it which part of the page contains the bog post text? Also, has anyone tried technorati style tags and how did you do it?
      • 6726
      • 7,075 Posts
      davidm Reply #2, 20 years, 2 months ago
      If you want information on how to set up a blog, read this tutorial.

      Now about Technorati, I don’t know the details exactly but it’s better to ping them for every new content to get indexed (see http://www.technorati.com/developers/ping/). Right now, I don’t know of any MODx plugin which does that automatically...

      It also seems that validating your pages could help there :

      6. Check your Validation

      If the Technorati spiders are unable to pick up your feed and/or your blog information, they will not be able to see the claim code.
      Possible problems our spiders could be running into are validation errors coming across in your blog HTML code.

      Last but not least, what are you using to generate your feeds : Ditto ?
      If so, check that you have read this :
      How to create RSS feed with Ditto ?
      [Ditto] RSS Encoding
      If you use NewsParserX, switch to Ditto which handles feeds better.

      Quote from: johnvb at Aug 11, 2006, 02:43 AM
      Also, has anyone tried technorati style tags and how did you do it?

      There is a very nice snippet to do just that, called TagCloud





        .: COO - Commerce Guys - Community Driven Innovation :.

        MODx est l'outil id
        • 14557
        • 48 Posts
        johnvb Reply #3, 20 years, 2 months ago
        Thanks for the tips. I’ve read the tutorial and have implemented it on that basis (without comments yet - until I get the formatting looking right). Also the web page validates fine. I create the newsfeed with a snippet called NewsFeed but the RSS also validates fine so I don’t think its that, though perhaps I should move to Ditto since that seems to be the way forward.

        I’ve pinged technorati, I’ve even deleted the technorati claim and reclaimed the blog but no luck. The problem is it does not know which part of my web page consitutes a blog post. sad
          • 28042 ☆ A M B ☆
          • 24,524 Posts
          sottwell Reply #4, 20 years, 2 months ago
          Maybe you should try a different template, one that it "source-ordered", so that in the HTML the main content comes first, the sidebars and headers come after and are positioned on the browser screen with CSS.
            Studying MODX in the desert - http://sottwell.com
            Tips and Tricks from the MODX Forums and Slack Channels - http://modxcookbook.com
            Join the Slack Community - http://modx.org
            • 14557
            • 48 Posts
            johnvb Reply #5, 20 years, 2 months ago
            Ok, I think I’ve worked this out. As sotwell pointed out, the template is not source ordered (another one for the to-do list!) and there were 2 RSS feed links on the page - one for the blog and one for the news on the left side. Technorati was picking up the one on the left as it was first in the source.

            I’ve moved the RSS link from the news and technorati seems to be working now. smiley Thanks for your suggestions!
              • 33337
              • 3,975 Posts
              Zaigham (aka zi) Reply #6, 20 years, 2 months ago
              Ohh... source ordering IS important wink

              Topic solved.

              regards.

              zi
                Zaigham R - MODX Professional | Skype | Email | Twitter

                Digging the interwebs for #MODX gems and bringing it to you. modx.link
                • 14557
                • 48 Posts
                johnvb Reply #7, 20 years, 2 months ago
                An update on this for anyone that’s interested. I am going to use a snippet to render out the blog entry’s keywords as technorati style tags. Not sure if I’m doing it the best way, but in case its of use to anyone here’s the code:
                $id = (!isset($id)) ? $modx->documentObject['id'] : "$id";

$table1 = $modx->getFullTableName("keyword_xref");
$table2 = $modx->getFullTableName("site_keywords");
$query = "SELECT k.Keyword FROM $table1 x INNER JOIN $table2 k ON k.id=x.keyword_id WHERE x.content_id=$id ORDER BY k.Keyword";
$result = "";
$rs=$modx->dbQuery($query);
while($row = $modx->fetchRow($rs)) {
  if (empty($result)) {$result = " in ";}
  else {$result .= ", ";}
  $result .= '<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/'.$row['Keyword'].'" rel="tag">'.$row['Keyword'].'</a>';
}
return $result;


                Do you think this is worth adding to the repository? Perhaps a few enhancements to make it use a placeholder or similar, not sure how to do that yet.