Experimenting with Blogger

[breakinglight11]

God knows I'm not very technically savvy. The level of knowledge I possess about how technology of any kind works and can be used is pretty pathetic, especially by comparison to so many of the people I spend time with. But one thing I've always been pretty proud of is I'm not half bad, when given a decent chunk of time, at messing around with a computer program until I figure out how to more or less use it and make it do what I want.

Today I was messing around with Blogger. I've been toying with the idea of keeping a freestanding blog in addition to this Livejournal, with content mostly the same but geared less toward people who know me personally and more toward the public at large, taking a more "article" approach for the format and not so much a diary. I would post mostly only my rants, musings, projects and the like, but not so much the stuff I did this past weekend. Since I've had a Blogger site that I've mostly used as a mirror of this LJ for use in cross-posting to Google Buzz (never did manage to get the LJ-cross-posting-to-Buzz to function) I thought it might be worth messing around with that to see if I could get it to look the way I wanted.

Basically I wanted to construct a widget that would let me divide my writing into broader categories of my interests-- larp, cooking, writing, theater, culture and criticism, that sort of thing --and have icons across the top of the page leading to posts on each particular subject. The closest I could manage in Blogger to that was to construct original HTML widgets that allowed me to link an image to a particular tag page on the journal in a left-side column. This is imperfect, as I wanted to cull only certain entries from within those tags and also combine certain other tags under new headings, which this doesn't allow. I suppose I could re-tag everything, but that would be labor-intensive and make these icons redundant with the tag system.

What I have right now I kind of like, but as I said I'm dissatisfied. The header image definitely needs tweaking, and as I said my categorizing is not quite what I want. I'll have to mess around with it more. And this is still just basically a mirror of my LJ. Perhaps I'll just reorganize everything and actually bother to re-tag if I make a more "general-audience" version of the blog. I know you can tag things and make those tags invisible in Blogger, which might eliminate the redundancy problem. For now I'm just experimenting with the setup, and seeing if I can use the conveniently already-existing Blogger technology to accomplish what I want.
 

Comments

[laurion]

You can try Wordpress.com as well. Many themes allow you to have separate tabs at the top for the different categories you tag your posts with. I'd be happy to help you take a stab at it, and if you like it, import material from your existing blog(s).

Of course, if you wanted to, you could get your own instance of Wordpress, and that would give you the complete flexibility you want, but then you have to pay the 5-10/month for hosting, plus a little more for your own domain name, and that may not be a level of effor that is worth it. Wordpress.com has the advantage of being free, but the disadvantage of not giving you -complete- freedom. But I suspect it is still more freedom than LJ or Blogger.