Webtropic

This has been bugging me for sometime now: how to display the technoratiy authority in a wordpress.com blog?

The chicklet provided by Technorati is, of course, working with Javascript, which means is useless for wordpress.com blogs.

Technorati has a rich api, but it requires some programming to use it. The solution cannot be programmatic, as we have no access to the .com blog code, and cannot employ external servers, because it is not a wordpress.com solution then.

After experimenting a lot with XSLT and producing an XSL document capable of giving the proper authority number for a blog, I dumped this approach, because, again, there is no way of incorporating the XSL solution in a wordpress.com blog.

I turned them to Yahoo pipes having in mind to transform the authority number into a feed and display it through a wordpress.com feed widget.

Since I am a newbie in Yahoo Pipes, I looked around for similar solutions and found the many pipes provided by engtech.

Then I was able to construct the one I wanted!

Ingredients:
a. You need to sign up in Technorati and get an API key.
b. You need to open a yahoo account (if you don’t have one already) and register for yahoo pipes.
c. Create a new pipe following the diagram below. The two points that you need to differentiate yourselves, are the API key (enter the one provided to you by Technorati), and your blog url.

d. Run the pipe and get the RSS feed url.
e. Enter the feed url in a wordpress rss widget, add the title of your liking and there you are!
You can check mine at the bottom of the sidebar. Of course, it need some formating to look like the real chicklet, but I will leave that for a future post.