Michele Campeotto

How do you get trackbacks without the spam and at the same time routing around your blogging software lack of that functionality?

Answer: you use some other tool, wich requires an even lower effort both on your and on other people’s side: Technorati Cosmos.

I started with a simple piece of code from Weblog Tools Collection, kept only the clever XML parsing trick and expanded it to a full Textpattern plugin. There was no license attached to that code, so I hope they are fine with me redistributing this.

So here is my Texpattern Technorati Cosmos plugin.

The plugin needs some easy configuration, in form of a Technorati Key and a cache directory wich must be writable by the web server.

To use it just place the tag <txp:mic_technorati_cosmos /> in your article form and you’re mostly done. With the default settings, the generated code will be like this:

<!-- Technorati Cosmos for http://currenturl -->
<h3 class="cosmos_label">Technorati Cosmos <a href=""><img src="bubble"></a></h3>
<ul class="cosmos_list">
    <li><a href="" title="">Cosmo title</a> &mdash; Cosmo excerpt</li>
    <li><a href="" title="">Cosmo title</a> &mdash; Cosmo excerpt</li>
</ul>

The label, the image and the excerpt can be customized and completely removed, please refer to the plugin’s help for more information. rel="nofollow" support is an attribute away, too.

You can see it at work in some of my articles and projects pages. Enjoy.

Update: New version with better duplicates detection