Technorati and Tailrank make it easy to track memes on the internet, and they allow you to post that sort of thing on your site. The problem is, it's like digging for gold trying to find out how. I found a couple of non-obvious uses of Technorati and Tailrank services to make your own site meme-o-rific. As you may know, I'm a huge Britney Spears fan. What? Guys, come on! Come back! Guys? Guys? Hello? Guys? Fellas? Anybody still there? Well, that didn't start off so well. For those of you who've stayed around, here's how you make up those valuable statistical models. You can take a quick gander at the Britney Tracker, then come back here and I'll show you how I did it. Back? Here's how to make 'em.

Technorati

This one's sort of obvious, in a non-obvious way. If you put in some keywords in the search box, and nothing that ends in .com/.org/.anything, you'll get a page like this. On that page you'll see a graphic that looks like this: Technorati Chart Click on that, and you get to this page. That's where I got the code, but I made a couple of possibly evil modifications. Technorati Chart
Get your own chart! That creates this thing. I left the "Get your own chart!" in there, because I'm not sure anybody knows that you can do that. I didn't, and I'd venture a guess that not a lot of people did know. <a href="http://technorati.com/search/Britney+Spears"> <img src="http://technorati.com/chartimg/%28Britney%20Spears%29?height=329&width=420&days=30" style="border:0" alt="Technorati Chart" /> </a><br /> <a href="http://technorati.com/chart/Britney+Spears">Get your own chart!</a> You can change that "Britney+Spears" to anything you'd like, but I don't know why you'd want to. There's just nothing more important in this universe that Britney Spears. Got it? Hello?

Tailrank

Putting in a list of the latest big stories from Britney wasn't as difficult a coding job, but it sure was hard to figure out. The main problem was that the Tailrank crew probably meant to tell us how to do this, but they're too busy making more awesomeness. That's what I'm hoping, anyways. They could still be in mourning for KFedEx, for all I know. There's a script to let you put the latest posts on your site, found here. Near the bottom of the page, you can see where you can get the javascript, and it'll put the 10 latest posts that are pulling a lot of emphasis. I'm not sure how it works (the meme-tracking), but the javascript works. I noticed something when I performed a search for Britney Spears. Tailrank allows you to keep an RSS feed for the memes you search, and the URL for the feed looks like: http://rss.tailrank.com/posts/find/?q=Britney+Spears So, I figured I'd stick the last part in the javascript, so that URL would look like this: http://jsi.tailrank.com/posts/find/?q=Britney+Spears Amazingly enough, it works. With coding and styling, you get this:

I just wrapped it in an unordered list, and let it do its magic. <ul> <li>script type="text/javascript" src="http://jsi.tailrank.com/posts/find/?q=Britney+Spears"></li> </ul> Since you're not like me, and you don't have an unhealthy addiction to Britney, you can put in there anything you like. Say, me, for instance. Then people will know without a shadow of a doubt you need counseling, immediately. I'm thankful these two sites let me post the most embarrassing part of my personal life, and let me share my shame so openly. I just wish there was better documentation for somebody who didn't know how to code this stuff as easily as I have here. Regardless, you can create a meme-tracking page or post in seconds with these techniques.

status: published
lastmod: '2006-11-15T06:36:29.000Z'
author: John Stansbury
cms: wordpress
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