A Consuming Experience: Blogger: categories via d2B

Wednesday 17 May 2006

Blogger: categories via d2B - delicious2Blogger

Categories - organising your previous posts under subject headings, usually in your sidebar - is one of the features missing from Blogger that its users most often wish for.

Blogger Categories with Delicious, aka d2B, the brainchild of my Magical Sheep pardner Kirk, is one of the best, neatest, most elegant and powerful ways to have categories in your Blogger blog - and he has recently updated and improved this already fab system. (An excellent list of all sorts of different ways to get categories for Blogger has been produced by John.)

Kirk's d2B categories system works by making use of the little-known Link Field in Blogger, in combination with tagging your post on the free social bookmarks manager Delicious - so you do need a Del.icio.us account, but it's free to sign up. Just check out Kirk's blog for an example of his system in action.

Once you've set up d2B, you'll get an extra Link Field box in your Create Post tab. You just write your post as normal, and in that new box you fill in the categories for that post, separating them with commas. Then you publish the post. Then view your new post, and click a special new link (which only you'll be able to see, and then only when you're logged in to Blogger) in order to post your categories info to Delicious. Add any notes you want to, and then save it, and that's it, your categories list will appear in your sidebar. You can even have a cloud view of your categories. Plus, if you have the time and energy (I fear I don't, that's why I'm sticking with my sometimes out of date manual system), you should be able to go back to your old posts and categorise them too.

It may all seem a bit complicated to set up, but never fear - all you have to do is follow Kirk's excellent step by step instructions precisely (yeah always do exactly what Kirk says, that's the motto...) and you should be fine.

Just take a look at his: