Summary of Blog Changes
Unless I discover something new and nifty I can do with Blogger, I think the blog changes are done for the immediate future. Here's what I've changed:
On the right, I've removed the "Recent Posts" and replaced it with "Recent Comments". I figure that people can see the recent posts right there on the front page, and a recent comment list is useful to keep track of which posts are still active. Note that this list only keeps track of the posts currently on the main page, but those also tend to be the posts with the most activity.
I've also changed the blog so you can display comments on the main page. This is a side effect of the fact that the site now uses cookies to track the number of comments on each post. This way, the blog should reflect the number of unread comments under each post. Initially, all comments are set to unread, but you can set a post's comments to "read" by expanding/collapsing them.
Finally, I've set up a convention for tagging posts and using Blogger's search function to pick up the tags. A list of tags I've come up with is on the right -- hopefully they're pretty self-explanatory. When writing a new post, a tag template should appear in the posting box. Replace the default tag name ("misc") with the desired tag (leaving the underscores in place). Note that this appears twice -- once in the URL and once in the actual tag text. Copy/paste the tag line to add additional tags.
Because Blogger search does not pick up on edits to archived posts, earlier stuff won't show up on the tag searches. Additionally, it can take up to 24 hours for the search engine to crawl the site, so new posts won't be immediately indexed. This was the best of the category systems I found -- the better alternatives all required much more work to implement and did not extend well to a group blog like we have. (Most of them required logging in to third-party bookmarking services like del.icio.us.)
Feel free to comment on these changes or suggest anything else that might make this blog easier to use.
Tags: blog_
On the right, I've removed the "Recent Posts" and replaced it with "Recent Comments". I figure that people can see the recent posts right there on the front page, and a recent comment list is useful to keep track of which posts are still active. Note that this list only keeps track of the posts currently on the main page, but those also tend to be the posts with the most activity.
I've also changed the blog so you can display comments on the main page. This is a side effect of the fact that the site now uses cookies to track the number of comments on each post. This way, the blog should reflect the number of unread comments under each post. Initially, all comments are set to unread, but you can set a post's comments to "read" by expanding/collapsing them.
Finally, I've set up a convention for tagging posts and using Blogger's search function to pick up the tags. A list of tags I've come up with is on the right -- hopefully they're pretty self-explanatory. When writing a new post, a tag template should appear in the posting box. Replace the default tag name ("misc") with the desired tag (leaving the underscores in place). Note that this appears twice -- once in the URL and once in the actual tag text. Copy/paste the tag line to add additional tags.
Because Blogger search does not pick up on edits to archived posts, earlier stuff won't show up on the tag searches. Additionally, it can take up to 24 hours for the search engine to crawl the site, so new posts won't be immediately indexed. This was the best of the category systems I found -- the better alternatives all required much more work to implement and did not extend well to a group blog like we have. (Most of them required logging in to third-party bookmarking services like del.icio.us.)
Feel free to comment on these changes or suggest anything else that might make this blog easier to use.
Tags: blog_
posted by Palcioz at 12:17 AM
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