I shmaak SA Blogs, sorted with Amatomu.comNot too long ago I registered my two blogs with Amatomu - a South African blog portal run by the Mail & Guardian newspaper, that attempts to correlate and link to as many South African blogs as possible. If you've got an interest in what other SA blogs have to say, it's worth a peruse.

Anyway, Eish!! made a valid point today - wouldn't it be great to have a "Shmaak It" link/button on the actual posts on your blog 'that would make it easy for the readers to click-and-schmaak?'. This would be similar to the way you can set up a 'Digg this' button for Digg

I had a quick look into this, and sorry folks - only bad news. I don't think it's going to be possible at the moment for a couple of reasons:

1. You can't predict reliably when your post has made it to Amatomu. This would leave a period where your post is visible on your blog, but isn't known by Amatomu, so it can't be Shmaaked.
2. You can't predict what "rss_id" Amatomu will assign to the post when it does appear on Amatomu. Guessing would only give someone else all your Shmaaks.
3. You need to be logged in to Amatomu in order to Shmaak a post. This limits who can actually Shmaak a post.

Whilst all of this isn't impossible to hack code around, it would mean probing the Amatomu site a fair bit, which I doubt they'd like. I don't think your hosting company or bandwidth bills would like it either. It would also leave you with a period where your post is available via your site, but not on Amatomu - Amatomu won't process a Shmaak for a post it doesn't know about.

Who knows, maybe M&G will make a public API available for just this functionality. Amatomu, just like every good Web 2.0 app is still in "Alpha".