I discovered, after posting that last post on the trouble I’m having with categories in Blogger, that the tools I used are working just fine.
So I should point to those self-same tools. There are essentially two tools on my bookmark bar in Firefox right now that are doing the job.
The first is a “Technorati del.icio.us” button by Ted Ernst that makes it very easy to put del.icio.us tags into a blog post.
The second cute trick is the “post to del.icio.us” button. I got this one from del.icio.us itself. Quick Online Tips has a list of these things, including some improvements. The Mozilla team also seems to be working on an extension that will do this.
So when composing or editing a post, you use Ted Ernst’s button to create your tags, and save them in your post in Blogger. Then, while viewing the post page (not the whole blog!), you click the “post to del.icio.us” button, which takes you to your del.icio.us account. Then enter your tags in the box provided, and you thereby associate these tags with that particular post in del.icio.us.
When somebody clicks on a category link in your blogpost, they will be taken to your del.icio.us account, showing all of your posts associated with that tag. Pretty neat!
Serious bloggers may scoff at my “gee-whiz” attitude toward all this, but after two days of searching, I find that simplistic, “gee-whiz” explanations can be very helpful for people who are not initiated. Indeed, it’s a feature of technological language that it can be very exclusive, but that its exclusivity isn’t seen as such by people who have learned what everything means. Once you’re inside, you forget what it was like to be outside.
One question for somebody: where did that domain name del.icio.us come from? What’s it mean?
Categories: blogging, tags, categories, blogger
I wonder if this works in livejournal? My livejournal blog is in both German and English, and I’ve struggled a lot with a format for this. I wonder if categories is it?
Where on earth do you find time. I have a list a mile long of stuff I want to learn about blogging and such, and I’m having trouble even getting to blogging. (Of course it takes me about three times as long to write anything, with going back and checking the grammar – and going back and fixing it after I miss it the first time. And it’s still not right.)
Julie