Wednesday, March 08, 2006

NEW: toybot studios categories!!! Coming Soon!!!

I always wanted to add categories to toybot studios. I think there are lots of great posts that get lost over time when they are not on the front page. I try to link back to them in current posts, but what if you want to see a post on a particular subject right away? Categories are the answer, BUT unbeknownst to me when I started this whole thing, Blogger DOES NOT support categories for some lame reason. Thank god for the web and hackers like Dan Chong. There is a hack for anything and there are several hacks out there to add categories to Blogger. Some are more complex than others. Dan's Blogger Category Hack uses Blogger's built-in search so essentially each category is a saved search. Pretty cool and very elegant. My only real complaint is that, ideally, I would have liked the results page be the posts themselves sorted by relevance. The way it works with Blogger search is that the results page are headlines of the posts and then you have to click on the post to get to that article. It makes for a lot of backpaging to get to the next result in the category. Dan's hack is very easy to implement and he even has a script generator where you just type your categories, the HTML code is automatically generated and then you cut and paste in your Blogger template! Voila! Instant categories! I had my first set up and running in less than five minutes! But the draw back with this quick and dirty method is that any post with the category name (keyword) will show up in the results list. Therefore the posts that you may want to fall under specific categories may or may not show up.

So I decided to categorize with a more systematic approach: tag each articles with the appropriate key words using an underscore to ensure that under each category, the exact posts I tagged will show up. This is going to take me a couple of days to get through all my old posts so please bear with me. So long story short, the reason why the categories don't work yet is because: 1. I haven't finished tagging all the articles and 2. Blogger needs to come around and re-index my old posts to pick up the new tags! Hopefully all of this will be resolved in the next few days!

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