- 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:

• 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):

<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>

(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.)



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]