BoingBoing's other blogs commenting on this post feature, added yesterday, has provoked a flurry of responses. Co-incidentally, I had just made myself a Technorati Trackback bookmarklet: drag to your toolbar, then click while visiting a blog article to see Technorati's roundup of posts commenting on the article.
As Cory Doctorow mentioned in an email I was cc'd on, the "other blogs commenting" feature ideally should display the count of inbound links, or, in case there are none, vanish. Here's a picture of a trial implementation:
There are two moving parts. First, a service that asks Technorati for the count, and returns some JavaScript. Here's the guts of my trial implementation:
tsearch = 'http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html'
tpage = urllib.urlopen(tsearch + '?url=' + url).read()
m = re.search ('from (\d+)',tpage)
count = int (m.group(1))
return """
document.write('Technorati comments:
%d')
""" % (url, count)
Second, a template modification to call this service for each published item, passing the permalink of the item, and including the results in a