- Blogging_: enable categories in your blog
Updated Nov 24: see my latest post with step-by-step instructions on creating categories.
Like many others, I was surprised that Blogger does not support categories. Did a search and found many cool hacks on tagging and creating pseudo categories, such as Zoundry's custom tags, FreshBlog's 3 methods and Billy Joe Jim Bob's multi-blog method. Still, I thought things could be simpler. This is my method:
When a user clicks on a category link, a blogger search is invoked, searching for posts that contain the category name within this blog. As you may have guessed, the prefixes in the titles make searching more effective. For even better search results, you can have more unique category names (than mine).
Categories: [Blogging_] Tags: [netcf2] [Categories]
Like many others, I was surprised that Blogger does not support categories. Did a search and found many cool hacks on tagging and creating pseudo categories, such as Zoundry's custom tags, FreshBlog's 3 methods and Billy Joe Jim Bob's multi-blog method. Still, I thought things could be simpler. This is my method:
- Tag every post with a category by prefixing its title with the category name, e.g. "Blogging: ...", "Getting started: ..."
- Modify the template code to include a Categories section. Here's an example based on what I have (as you can see in my sidebar, I have a few categories currently; for clarity, this example shows just one category):
(Note: the whole <li>...</li> should be on one line, and you should replace netcf2.blogspot.com with your blog url, as well as the value for the as_q parameter.)<h2 class="sidebar-title">Categories</h2> <ul> <li><a href="http://search.blogger.com/?ie=UTF-8 &ui=blg&bl_url=netcf2.blogspot.com&x=0&y=0&scoring=d& as_q=getting%20started">Getting started</a></li> </ul>
When a user clicks on a category link, a blogger search is invoked, searching for posts that contain the category name within this blog. As you may have guessed, the prefixes in the titles make searching more effective. For even better search results, you can have more unique category names (than mine).
Categories: [Blogging_] Tags: [netcf2] [Categories]
5 Comments:
Wow, this is one smart idea. I would have never have thought of this if I never came across this blog! The best idea I could come up with for putting stuff under categories is, make a post with all the posts that belong to that category (which is extremly time consuming, hence I haven't done that yet!)
Here is another variant:
http://pappmaskin.blogspot.com/2005/10/blogger-categories.html?tag=Art
Thank you for being smart enough for figure out how to do something like this and make it look so easy! I wish I had all the hours back that I wasted trying to work some way around the system that you so effortlessly just produced!
Okay, this looks like a great idea. However, When I use the blogger search feture to "search this blog" it never finds all of the posts that I have which contain these keywords, EVEN if the keyword is in the title. I find this to be incredibly annoying, and wonder why this happens.
hi dazed, may I suggest you go to this post at http://netcf2.blogspot.com/2005/11/blogging-categories-categories.html. Some users have asked about this, and I've answered them to the best of my ability. There are also some standard things to check.
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