Now that my blog is a little over a month old, it’s time to do some straightening up. (Have I mentioned that I am a neat freak?)
Since Blogger doesn’t have a way to create categories, I looked at several possible work arounds:
Old Cola’s solution involves creating separate blogs for each category, then taking advantage of Blogger’s send-to-blog email function to send the post from your catagory blog to your main blog. Then all you have to do is make links to your category blogs in your sidebar. Cute, huh? Only problem for me is that I would have to maintain 4 blogs, too much trouble as far as I am concerned.
Phydeaux has posted a 3 part work around that uses something called del.icio.us. It really seems to be the most eloquent solution, because it allows you to hide the category name in the post title, keeping everything behind the scenes. This is the one I want to try, but it’s clear I will need a weekend to play with the template, and I really am a novice at this.
DanChong has a simple solution, one of several that take advantage of Blogger’s search functions. I liked his best, because he has created a script generator that writes the html code specific to your blog. It’s simple, and that’s what I am going to use. Because I don’t want to have categories in my titles, I am putting category titles as techorati tags at the end of my posts. (Just have to be careful to keep those category names out of my post body…)
Okay, let’s see if this thing works… To test it with me, just click on the “Considerations” Category in my sidebar, and it will show a link to this post. Neat, huh?
Thanks, Dan!
Category: [considerations]
Yeah, I left Blogger to get categories. WordPress.com and TypePad both have import scripts that will take all your posts and bring them into a new blog on those platforms; both have categories. (I actually use the Dewey Decimal System as my category structure…I like to cover all the bases ;)).
You have your own domain name, so changing the service your blog is on isn’t such a big deal, because you can just change what your domain points to — no getting everybody to forget an old address and get a new one (this is a very smart idea, by the way, one more bloggers should do. Domains are cheap, and if you blog for awhile you’ll probably change hosting at one point or another).
Or, you could use some sort of tagging mechanism…I’m not sure how that would work, I need to think about it a little bit.
Thanks for the tip. just what I needed to know.