One More New Feature

Last Updated on July 30, 2017

One more minor change here at “Patrick’s Place:” I’m in the process of adding category tags for easy referencing. The category list is on the sidebar.

Blogger does not make this easy. Unlike some other blogging platforms, Blogger has no method of tagging individual posts with certain categories so that posts within the same category can be easily grouped together to be found more quickly.

So I had two options: tags from Technorati, or tags from Del.icio.us.

Though there may be an easy way to do it, I couldn’t figure out how to make Technorati tags appear in my sidebar. And at Technorati’s site, I couldn’t find a way to make my individual tags appear seperate from all of the other tagged items everyone else uses.

So my workarond was to use a relatively new feature of Del.icio.us, called Tagrolling. When I tag a post, it produces an updated list of my tags that goes in my sidebar with a short bit of code. When you click on one of those categories, you’re taken to my Del.icio.us category listing, which then gives you links to all of the posts back here that fall under that individual category.

The larger the category name (and the more blue), the more post there on that subject. The smaller the category name (and the more red), the fewers posts there are on that subject. And the number of posts categorized within each category also appears.

It sounds complicated, and it is more complicated than it would be if Blogger would just add categories to its own software. But until it does, there’s at least this.

Eventually, I’ll categorize all of the posts, just because it’ll annoy me if I end up leaving anything out. And I realize that I’ll have to make some concessions to the tag software: I can only have single-word tags. So when I write about game shows, I have to tag them “gameshows.” Yes, this bugs the hell out of me. But until I come up with something better, or until Blogger comes up with something better, it is what it is, and I hope you enjoy it.