Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Hidden, Read More, or Normal?

I'm wondering about the style of posts that are on this page. As you might have noticed, I like to post about things in the news that interest me. It's mostly Tech, because I'm a tech-head, but some other things too. Anway, what I would like to know is what people think of the Blogger hacks that I have tried in the past. The first is the "[+/-] show/hide this post" hack which is useful, but I believe it really screws up the UI when viewed in Internet Explorer. The second is the "Read More" hack, which is the one I really like. It allows for the title of the post to be displayed and a bit of what's inside, and then if you find it interesting enough you can read on.

Another thing I wanted to implement was the use of tags and categories. It turns out, there's really not a clean, easy way to do this. It a bit of a bummer, seeing as this blog would be much easier to navigate if you were able to click on the topic that interests you and leave everything else in the dust.

Well, there is one way that uses Technorati and del.icio.us, but each post you do is a pain as you have to mess with these tags. Also, the problem with it is that when you do want to sort the posts, you click on the category and it brings you to Technorati, which, I have to say, is about the ugliest, most annoying webpage I've viewed in a long time. Let's just hope that the Blogger people are working on tags and categories.

1 comment:

Jeremy said...

I like the Read More hack...and agree with your assessment of the Technorati tags solution, which seemed super clunky to me. Truth be told, I've had fine luck with searching my own blog with google when I need to find something -- tags/categories are nice, but not necessary.

One thing I did on a previous blog and somehow managed to lose was a sort of surrogate category system where I had a list of "categories", and each was simply linked to the google search result for that keyword, searching only my site. Worked pretty slick, actually.