Can I create a Technorati "favorites" link?

Great idea! In fact, I'll demonstrate how to create a "favorite me" button for Technorati by using my own weblog as a demonstration, and perhaps we can mutually favorite each other as a way to help jointly promote our writing?

Thing is, there are lots of ways you can use the system -- and even try to game the system -- to gain visibility and traffic, but the very best way remains to produce quality original content. Just as there's no substitute as a musician for musical ability, there's no substitute in the world of blogging for actually taking the time to write interesting and informative entries that are relevant and engaging for your target audience and market segment.

Once you have that moving along, then it is time to do online promotion, and making sure you're visible in popular blog search engine Technorati is definitely a good move. So, so enough chatting. Let's dig into some code!

The first step is to go to Technorati and find your own weblog. You can most easily do this with a search. I'll search for "dave taylor tech support":

By default, it shows you matching blog entries, but you want to click on the "blogs" tab, which results in:

That's what we want, and this blog is listed as the top match. Makes sense.

The key element we want here is the little red "fave" link. Right click or option click on that link (PC or Mac, respectively) and choose "Copy Link" and you'll end up with something like:

That's the URL for favoriting this weblog in Technorati. That's what you want (albeit for your own weblog), but let's have a bit of fun with it before we wrap up.

One thing to know is that you can safely convert the ugly "%3A%2F%2F" into "://", which makes the URL quite a bit more readable:

Now let's pour it into a basic HTML link:

Rudimentary, but it works: Favorite me on Technorati!

Better would be to grab the graphic too, which proves to be pretty tricky because Technorati's using some CSS to get the visual element, not a specific graphic. However, that's easily remedied by just grabbing it with a screen capture program and trimming the resultant graphic down to make a graphical button anyway. Like this:

Put it all together, copy the graphic to your own server, and now you can easily add a simple little button to your blog template like this:

Try it, favorite me, and, well, I can always do with more visibility too. Helps keep the traffic flowing and the lights on in our offices!

Here's the code for the button above too, in all its HTML glory:

One more tweak: how about a "form" button for this task instead, since we know exactly what data we need to send? Here's the code:

Let's test it:

Again, click on it to see what happens and help me out a wee bit while you're at it!

Good luck