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Sunday 15 January 2006

Blog categories code: small fix






My bad. My post on how to include manual categories in your blog via a template hack, was meant to incorporate an improvement, discovered of course by Kirk, upon the Blogger Help code on which it's based - but I'd spent so many hours fiddling with my template and the post that I ended up pasting an older version mistakenly into my post. I've just noticed my mistake.

I've fixed it in that post now so you can just copy/paste from that post wholesale. If you've already used the code in your own blog template, the next time you update it just change the bit of the code in the head part of your template that says
.shown {display:inline}
to
.shown {display:block}

That little change will sort out an issue where the first item of each list is indented more than the other items when the blog is viewed in Internet Explorer. It also fixes a display quirk in Firefox and Opera too, although in those it's less obvious, where again the lists really don't indent as they should. Changing "inline" to "block" makes them indent properly.


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6 comments:

Nikhil Pahwa said...

Hey! How about using technorati tags as categories, instead of manually listing posts?

I've done that on my blog: I've listed Movies as a category, and on the sidebar, I've linked to: http://technorati.com/tag/Movies?user=nixxin

I don't know if anyone else has tried this before.

Nikhil Pahwa said...

The problem I'm facing with that is that it only works for new posts, since technorati doesn't ping the really old posts. I blog at http://mixedbag.blogspot.com

Improbulus said...

Absolutely, the unrest cure. I've been working on something like that for a couple of weeks now and will be posting on it soon.

As you say it only works for posts you've tagged which appear on Technorati's tag pages.

Nikhil Pahwa said...

Uhh...no, not that. I edited and tagged the old posts, and technorati didn't ping the old posts that have been tagged.

Improbulus said...

Oh, The Unrest Cure, I see what you mean now. Unfortunately Technorati and other search engines like Icerocket only index posts that are on your FRONT page, in my case http://consumingexperience.blogspot.com for instance (not post/item pages).

The only way to get Technorati to tag your old posts is to tweak your blog settings so that ALL those old posts appear on your main page, and with the 1 MB size limitation on Blogger pages you may not be able to get all your old posts on your main page to ping Technorati about. Then, after the old posts are tagged, you switch it back to 10 posts or however many you normally show on your main page.

Plus, it makes your main page load very slowly and it may not work, at least it didn't with Icerocket though I've heard others have managed to get it to work with Technorati.

Nikhil Pahwa said...

That explains a lot. Add to that the fact that technorati often doesn't ping my blog for weeks, lest I ping manually.

So I guess using technorati for categorising is a waste of time. I'll attempt the same with del.icio.us when I get the time.

Thanks.