I had a whole thing a while back, when I first started this blog, that I really wanted to be able to post things in categories. But Blogger doesn't have this capability in and of itself, and the hack I found to get around it sounded like a big roundabout pain in the butt. And I'm too cheap to buy Moveable Type, too technologically challenged to try out something open-source, and also too cheap to obtain sufficient web space to operate either of these things.
But, thanks to Rhys Wynne and Rhys Wynne (these are two different guys, trust me), and thanks also to Technorati I'll soon be trying out a new method of categorizing posts on the blog of YA book reviews I contribute to, ReadingYA: Readers' Response. Basically, you tag all your posts with the desired categories (that will be the time-consuming part) using Rhys Wynne's tag generator. Then you go to Technorati and do a search of your blog using the desired search term (i.e., sci-fi). Then you use the URL of that search page for the category Sci-Fi in your list of categories in the sidebar. Not bad.
6 comments:
Have you tried this out yet? My Categories (i.e. Technorati searches) aren't working that well - hmph!
Another alternative which might also not work is doing something similar with the Blogger search at the top of the page! Back to the drawing board!
It still worth tagging though, and teh tag generator makes it easy. Thank goodness for teh technically minded.
All I've done so far is started tagging posts, so I haven't had a chance to really try it out. I haven't had much luck with the Blogger search in the past, when I've tried to use it to locate a post more quickly (as opposed to going through the archives month by month). I've had the experience of typing in a search term I know damn well is in the post, but nothing came up.
But I think I'll probably at least attempt the categories, and give it a test run on the book review blog once we've tagged a decent amount.
Hmm...maybe I'll do some research on other services that index tags, besides Technorati. I heard of a few, but I can't remember the names now...
To categorise posts properly, you need a technorati account that links back to your blog.
If you have a look at
my profile you see the categories listed which I blog.
If you want a categories list on your blog, may I recommend you tagging del.ici.ous using technorati tag generator, and using freshtags, which is a javascript that allows you to list your tags on your blog.
Well, A.F., I looked at doing this to my newest blog posts, and had it do something weirdly crash-esque twice, so I'm going to wait until the weekend and, um, hit up Tadamack Tech Support. Hee.
ARGH! Unfortunately, I'm my in-house tech support, which is scary.
I looked at the del.icio.us and Freshtags thing that Rhys #2 (above) mentioned. The layout of the result page is more spare, which is nice, but on the other hand, it's almost too spare...no "teaser" information about the blog post. Whereas Technorati returns the first bit of each post along with the title.
Huh. This is all becoming very complicated.
Far TOO complicated for me, I'm sorry to say. I looked at Poundy and she has recently WordPress'd her stuff so it looks totally different... and of course, I think you have to pay for that. And, since there's no chance of anyone actually taking our blog and making a novel about it (as it is about other people's novels and someday our own), we probably don't need to go that route. But I'm so lazy that anything beyond the rudimentary HTML that I do strikes fear into my heart.
I'll keep looking for something, here...
And I just want to ask what the chances are of not ONE, but TWO Rhys Wynnes. I mean, synchronicity. Wow.
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