I noticed a little while ago, that there was a new option in Blogger layout 'add a new page element' which interested me, and today I tried it out. The new page element offers to list your post labels so that your readers can navigate to posts with a topic that interests them. The downside is that is lists ALL your labels (in my case, it looks like about 250 different tags...which has added two hundred and fifty lines to my sidebar!). I even had to change my settings... I now list 24 posts on a page so that the posting side and the side bar are still in some sort of balance (I don't like to see blogs where the sidebars are empty half-way down, it's a waste of free cyberspace...).Then I thought of a fix.... If you can't define, say your twelve top labels, you CAN go back and remove the pesky single-use labels or swap them for your more popular ones... I like the way that Blogger have offered something that I not only want to use, but has actually made me think more about how I am going to blog in the future. My blog will be tidier because rogue labels will have been removed (when I get round to it), and in the future, I will just use previously existing labels except in special circumstances.
Of course if you use Wordpress, you can get plug-ins for 'categories' which is nice, I am glad that Blogger are now in a position to offer something similar and no doubt there is plenty more stuff in the pipeline??
7 comments:
The new drill-down archive listings are quite nice too. If you have a blog that's been running several years, it sure beats a listing of 30 or 40 separate months taking up valuable sidebar space.
The tags thing is nice, but to keep the list from getting unwieldly, it would take some serious tag consolidation.
Definitely looks good! Like Jonathan, I think that the tags feature can get a bit out of control.
I love the new features and look forward to seeing you implement them in the near future!
Ellie
http://www.thepinkc.net
I must get those labels sorted out. While I was composing the post I guessed that there were maybe 70 different labels - when I sent to count them, there were over 240!!
I would rather make use of the feature and organise the labels better, rather than miss out on the feature as it is something that I use on other people's blogs and can see the value of it.
Thank you both for your comments
But surely a top 10 (or any other reasonable number) listing of most popular labels would be trivial for Blogger to implement. Probably a quick CSS hack.
If I think about most of posts, since I tend to be all over the map, the only way to significantly reduce the number of labels would be to use less specific labels on a lot of posts, which rather defeats the purpose.
I found that I am using probably nearly 200 redundant labels, this feature has highlighted how many labels I have only used once. A visitor can click on a label to see all the posts with that label - therefore using the label just once equally defeats the purpose... The right balance would be using labels that are specific enough without being too specific.
You can get a label cloud hack for blogger here:
http://phy3blog.googlepages.com/Beta-Blogger-Label-Cloud.html
This allows you to keep your "rouge" tags while assigning a value to posts displayed in the cloud.
For instance, you can choose to display only your most popular tags in the cloud by only showing tags listed in 10 or more posts.
I have it installed on my site and it seems to work well-looks cool too!
give me that URL again??
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