A Fat Knowledge Omnibus and misc. Hacks
Fat Knowledge blog is a fairly recent addition to my blogroll, and one of my regular stops on my web-rounds. In a recent flurry of activity, Mping has categorised his favourite postings over the past two years!But that is just the beginning. Scroll down from the top and you will find individual postings for his favourites from fifteen different important and thought-provoking categories from energy to men vs women to all original pieces. He did all of that on one day, 13 Sep 06. Mping's blog covers a wide range of human knowledge, and is always thought provoking.
Pretty impressive. But that is just one approach to displaying posts within specific categories. Over at Audacious Epigone, another one of my recent favourites, you will see that crush41 has compiled his posts in categories on his sidebar, even though Blogger does not provide for "categories" like some blog providers (Wordpress). C41 had to use a hack to put categories on his blogspot blog. I like that.
In fact, I am looking at various hacks for Blogger. If any of you have discovered some useful hacks for blogger, please point me in the right direction, thanks.
So do not be surprised if the look of this blog starts to change slowly, as I find the time, and no doubt subtly. But never fear: the pugnacious and offensive content of this blog will never change.
:-)
posted by al fin at 11:19 am
3 Comments:
Al,
It took a long time to do (they might have all been published on the same day, but I have been working on it for much longer than that), but reading your blog entry and the kind words you have to say makes me think it was worthwhile. It was also a good process to go back through what I had written and categorize it all.
When people come to the site via a search, they typically read a single post and unless they see something interesting in the current posts they move on. I was getting tired of spending a long time to write up a really good post and then not having many people read it. Hopefully now they will be able to read some of the best stuff I have done rather than just the most recent. In general I think that blog searches end up giving you the most recently created material rather than the best material.
If you have any input on posts that you think are good and should be on the best of page (either now or in the future), please let me know. Really what I would like is a digg like tool that would allow readers to select what they think are the best rather than having me decide.
Another issue I had is that I have a lot of interests. :) I think the Al Fin blog is one of the few that can match me for such a wide variety of topics. I figured that lots of people are only interested in a couple of topics on the blog, but they didn't have a good way to find others in that topic. By adding these best of categories, if all you are interested in is ethanol, now you can read all of my ethanol entries.
As for hacking blogger, there is the new beta version of blogger that allows for labeling/tagging and some other nifty stuff. Hopefully it will be released soon. I tested it out but it didn't allow for manual editing of the template file so it isn't good enough for me yet. I did some research on expandable posts a while back that might be useful to you. I have also seen a hack to incorporate del.icio.us tags into blogger.
Good luck with trying to integrate categories into your blog.
I have the same thoughts with regards to both Al Fin's blog and Fat Knowledge.
While I enjoy relishing in the hacker label, it's a misnomer. I'm not that clever. Instead, I simply made several posts a while back, saved but didn't publish them, essentially turned them into archives by adding to them each time I have a new post under a respective category (and inserting a permalink to that post in the archival title), and threw the links up under the heading of 'previous blather'.
Both of you are far too modest.
Mping: Thanks for the tips. I tried your idea on the expandable post, and it seemed to work well, once I made all the mistakes I could possibly make, then corrected them. :-)
C41: Your hack is clever enough, and seems to do the job. Compared to my clumsy approach of trying to create multiple blogs for different categories, your approach is quite elegant.
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