Permalinks: Up and hAtom!

Thursday, January 17, 2008 5:01 PM

Posted by Michał Cierniak, Software Engineer, Search Quality

Have you ever clipped text from a site and later found that the link Google Notebook associated with it takes you back to a page that doesn't have your clipped content anymore? I know I have. Luckily, there's a new feature in Notebook to help you see your note in its original context. In the newly released version of the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer, if you clip part of a page that supports the hAtom standard, we will save the correct permalink and title for the text you clipped.

Say you're reading the Bird Lovers Only Rescue blog and notice the post from 5 January 2008 announcing a PBS Nature Series called Parrots in The Land Of Oz. You keep a notebook on TV shows about birds, so you select the text describing the show and clip it into Google Notebook. If you did this with an older version of Notebook, you would see the clipped text with the title "Bird Lovers Only Rescue" and http://birdloversonly.blogspot.com as the URL. But when you navigated back to this page later, you would only see the most recent posts, not the one you were trying to save. The post you wanted would be hiding somewhere in the site. But the new Toolbar with Notebook helps make sure your notes take you back to the right place.

Please note this feature only works on web pages that support hAtom and the number of sites that use this standard is limited. Here's a a list of sites that support hAtom, including popular news sources like People Magazine and numerous blogs. The Blogger platform supports hAtom for all blogs that use the new templating system.

We hope that more and more sites will support hAtom and other microformats in the future. If you want to modify your blog's template just enough to make Google Notebook find the permalink info, you can follow my instructions, which are intended for Blogger. If you know enough about HTML to customize your blog's template, you should be able to figure out how to apply them to other blogging software.