Connecting your blog to Skype

Millions of people around the world use Skype to talk to each other, and since blogs are all about helping people communicate better, we're glad to see a number of new efforts making it easier to plug into Skype right from your Movable Type-powered blog.

Skype Journal, the most popular independent blog about the Skype community, has shared an overview called "Skype Tags and Your Blog". In his post, Stuart Henshall says,

Skype Tags for MT - Movable Type. How to add Chat tags, VM - voice messaging, and "info" tags. Add the code below to your MT templates and you will have active icons. There are a whole range of icons you can activate all using the same basic structure.

Using Skype's APIs, it's easy to add icons to your blog for any common action, such as initiating a call, leaving a voice message, discovering a person's online status, or just finding out a user's information.

One of the best parts of the new functionality is that it shows off the clever ways that open APIs can be extended, adding new features that a platform's creators might never have anticipated. Judging by the enthusiastic post on Skype's official blog, the Skype team is just as excited as we are.

Of course, since both Skype Journal and the official Skype Share blog are both powered by Movable Type, we expect that their teams will find even better ways to make blogs and voice chat work together in the future.