I have done it!

[Insert trumpet flourish]

After reading this post about how Technorati works, it was suggested that you ping the Technorati RPC server so it knew that you were around. I wanted to this with every post and asked some questions on my weblog in this post.

Well, I spent some time inside Radio and have figured out a solution. I wanted the correct Technorati URL to automatically populate the “URLs to Ping:” box on the desktop website. Here's a short description of how it's done.

[this is all at your own risk. I'm a Radio novice and you probably shouldn't take my advice. Ask Jake first.]

Open the Radio application. Go to the Tools menu and choose Developers…>Jump… Type radio.macros in the dialog box and click OK. You are now looking at a list of Radio's built in macros. Scroll down to near the bottom of the list to find “weblogPostForm”. This macro generates the weblog post form (duh!) found on the desktop website home page. Open the macro and look for some text that says “bundle //trackback URLs to Ping box” This is the “bundle” of code that takes the generates the “URLs to Ping:” text box and assigns the contents to a variable when the form is invoked.

Now that we are in the right place, here's where we make a change. Remember, if you screw this up and destroy your copy of Radio without a backup, it's your own fault.

Open the bundle (on a Mac double click the triangle). Open the subheading of the bundle. You should see the first line of code start with “add(“. Look for the HTML tag “text area”. It's inside this text area of the form box that we will add some text. This will allow it to autopopulate the form each time. Now, inside this tag, look for a formating part that looks like this:

wrap=\”soft\”>

Add the Technorati URL (http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping) to the right of the “>” symbol.

Close all of the Radio app windows. Restart Radio, if you like.

Reopen the desktop website home page. Now, when you post articles using the desktop website, the Technorati site will get a ping, along with the trackback URLs.

Questions? Comments?