I'm going through a maintenance cycle on my blog.  Unlike previous times when the bug to shakes things up bit, I'm not going to dramatically change the appearance of the blog.  But I am adding a few things that you'll notice.

First, I'm bringing back Technorati tags.  I like them, but my offline editor, w.bloggar, didn't have the feature to create the tags automatically from a list of keywords I provide.  Creating the tag list became a chore I didn't want to do, so I stopped tagging my posts.  A new blog editor called Performancing does include this feature, and I'm trying it out.  Performancing is relatively new, by the way, and it runs inside Firefox, which is kind of cool.

Second, I'm including a link for people who want to add a post to their del.icio.us lists.  For those who don't use del.icio.us, it is an online facility for storing links to your favourite web pages.  I never used it before, but in recent months, I've changed computers five times.  After the fifth and final change, it occurred to me that I should have used del.icio.us to avoid losing all my favourite links, and recreating the list over and over again.  For people who a sharper than me and are already using del.icio.us, clicking the link takes you to the page for adding a link to your list, prefilled with the post title and URL.

Third, I'm adding a Digg link. Digg is a relatively recent service.  You sign on and Digg provides you with links to online content for all sorts of topics (technology, news, politics, etc).  The content is selected by the users themselves.  If you see something you like, you go to Digg and provide the particulars about where the web page is found and the category in which it belongs (the Digg link on my posts prefills that information, and selects the category "politics").  As you read links provided by other Digg users, you have an opportunity to vote for material you find particularly worthy.  Links with more votes are sorted higher into the lists presented by Digg, ensuring that quality material is widely read.  For people who like my material, you now have an option other than leaving a "Nice post!" comment (though I like those too).

The placement of the links and buttons for these new elements will migrate over the course of the next few days as I settle into a presention I like.

Update: I think I'll be going back to bloggar. I'm researching how to create my Technorati lists from the Movable Type keyword field.

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