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2024.08.26

Put Hashtags on Your Blog Posts

Blogging is the slow game, done sporadically over decades. Tags and categories help organize your work within itself, but hashtags let you develop a subject alongside the rest of your community.

Subject:

Octothorpes

Octhorpes is a sort of combination Web Ring and Search Engine, creating a community space where we can add to a body of work beyond our own blogs and find each others work by subject, theme, or idea. Once your site is a member of the ring you can tag your posts however you might like.

The easiest way to add Hashtags to your blog post to is create a <link> element anywhere on in your blog post:

<link 
  rel="octo:octothorpes"
  href="architecture" >

This will add your posts URL to the Hashtag feed #architecture.

Another thing you can do is add a hashtag by linking to your own site. For instance, I have a page at /architecture that collects that tag. I can link to that from an article to add the #architcture hashtag:

<a 
  rel="octo:octothorpes" 
  href="/architecture">
  Architecture
</a>

Both of these links work the same. The key is the rel="octo:octothorpes" bit, which is a machine-readable bit of micro data for defining the relationship between this url and that url.

Now that the hashtag is on your page, you need to have the page indexed with the web ring. The best way to do this is to add one of these to your page as well:

<link 
  rel="preload" 
  as="fetch" 
  href="https://octothorp.es/?uri=<page-url-here>">

For this page, this would be href="https://octothorp.es/?uri=https://nikolas.ws/hashtags-for-blogposts">. This can also go anywhere in your page. What this does is — when someone loads up your page to read your sweet post — send a little GET request to the Octothorpes web ring. The ring then knows that your url should be indexed (it won’t do it too often).

The server will ping your page, look at the HTML the server sends over (so no client-side Hashtags, sorry Squarespace) and add your page and its tags to its feeds.

If you want to embed all the other URLs that tag a page as well – like you see at the bottom of this page – you can use our custom element:

<script
      async=""
      defer=""
      type="module"
      data-register="https://octothorp.es"
      src="https://octothorp.es/tag.js"></script>
      
<octo-thorpe>architecture</octo-thorpe>

For more technical details and other neat things you can, please refer to the docs!

Hope too see your posts soon.

Elsewhere

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