New feature – categories!

You might have noticed that I’ve started tagging some of my posts with categories. This is a feature I’ve coveted from Typepad and other blogging software for a while. (Not that I’m easily categorizable. I came up with more than 20 possible categories just looking at my list of post titles. I do ramble on.)

Blogger still doesn’t have a category feature, although they came out with a comment feature within a week of me installing HaloScan and with Blogger Images the very day after I discovered Flickr, so expect something new from them soon. (Four hundred thousand bloggers, but they’re dialed in to me.) In the meanwhile, thanks to FreshBlog and Ted Ernst, I’ve figured out how to use del.icio.us tags to organize some categories. When you click on a category tag at the end of a post, it will bring you to delicious, which sorts the tags by category and lists the posts.

It’s an inelegant workaround, but it does the job. I’ve been using delicious for a while. I love the social aspect of the bookmarking – what do other people think is cool. I’ve gone through some of the archives and tagged them, and will pick away at more of them as time permits.

Now, can anyone explain to me how to make conditional expandable post? The ones where you can truncate yourself and have a “click here to read more” link to the full text? (Andrea, no pressure, but I’m thinking of you here.) I tried the Blogger hack but I must have lost something in the translation from the original Spanish.

Speaking of Andrea, she’s got a really cool new project going on – a new Webzine called The Whole Mom:

We believe that mothers have important and interesting things to say about the world outside of the nursery, the kitchen and the playroom; but that too often our voices are marginalized into “mothers’ publications” or that, if a mother speaks in another venue, she will frequently mask her status in the interests of supposed objectivity. At TheWholeMom.com we believe that motherhood (of any kind) is central to a woman’s identity, but it is not the whole of her identity—and it is the intersection of this one life-altering role and the many other roles, pursuits, interests and identities a woman may have that we intend to explore.

Cool, eh? They’ve put out a call for submissions. Check it out!

Categories: blogging

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