Girish Gangadharan

Turns out that a bunch of smart people decided to start off yet another practice that they hope would make better use of hyperlinks to put a human face on linking on the web.

XFN� (XHTML Friends Network) is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. In recent years, blogs and blogrolls have become the fastest growing area of the Web. XFN enables web authors to indicate their relationship(s) to the people in their blogrolls simply by adding a ‘rel’ attribute to their href tags

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I think it is a pretty interesting concept considering how the rel attribute could be used to build social networks just based on the links to other people on each person’s site.

So i decided to write a plugin for textpattern that would help people build rel attribute just like the wizard here.

I knew it was not going to be easy. It wasn’t. I actually had to write 2 instead of 1 as planned. But it certainly was a lot of fun. I’m almost done with it. So the first one is an admin side plugin, which involves altering the txp_link table in the textpattern database – adding an extra field to save the attribute, that helps people add links to their site just like they do under the default links section but with the extra rel-creator wizard. Here’s a screenshot of the admin side plugin.

And then i had to extend Manfre’s mem_glinklist plugin(i like it better than others) to display the links with the rel attribute because textpattern doesn’t support this by default(which explains adding a new field to the table in the db). In case you didn’t know, the description you enter for each link gets displayed as the title attribute in the hyperlinks when rendered as html.

You can check out the links section of this site and see for yourself. Either right click on any link there and click on properties to see the “Relation” attribute or just view the page source and check out the hyperlinks.

I’ll submit these 2 plugins to the textpattern community forum pretty soon after some clean up and final touches. Stay tuned…