Monday, February 12, 2007

Blogger 2.0

Blogger has finally seen fit to allow me to switch this blog to their upgraded version. If it continues to work right, all writers will be asked to switch when you sign in. Don't worry, it is painless, although it may take a minute if you are on a slow connection.

In terms of reading, and writing on the blog, this won't mean all that much to you. There are a few enhancements in what you can do with the look of the blog, and feeds and such like, but since we mostly stick to the basics, most of this stuff will pass right by. Though feel free to play around a little.

One big change is the ability to add tags. For the uninitiated tags are like little categories you can add to each post. The idea being that whenever someone visits the blog they will have all our little posts in nice neat categories. Say you want to read every post by Jamison, blamo, right in a neat little link you can have them all neatly piled up. Or say you are interested in our thoughts on religion, or the Beatles, or various cheeses. Well, with tags you can see everything written on a particular subject.

All of these tags can be added to the side bar for easy access. At least I think they can, but have yet to figure out how.

I will, over the course of the next few days/weeks/months, be going back and adding tags to all of our posts. I do want to create a tag for each person that posts. However, before I do that I want some permission. I know some of you are weary of getting your full name into the world wide web, and so I would like everyone to include the name you would prefer for tags. I can very easily use the names you use in blogger, as they are already attached to the posts created and the comments written, but if you want another name, let me know.

For the future, the ways to create a tag are simple. Simply type in the categories, seperated by a comma, in the little space that is just below the area you normally write a post in. Blogger labels it as "labels" and it is pretty straight forward from there.

It is usually best not to get too terribly specific as then there won't be very many posts in a category. I'll probably add some generally generic ones like: "religion", "work", "life stories", "movies" and such like. I'll let everyone know exactly what I create once I get there. But you are welcome to come up with some of your own too.

5 comments:

Mat Brewster said...

Sorry gang, in updating our template I killed the frapper map, the jamison quiz and the harry potter count down.

Mat Brewster said...

Alright, I got the tags and the frappr map up. Sorry don't have the code for HP or Jamison quiz. I'm liking the template on this, lots of easy ways to change it. Could be fun.

JS said...

no worries on teh HP counter and the survey....
As for tagsa... im cool with just Jamison. I like to keep first and last name off the net as much as possible.

Mat Brewster said...

Yeah I didn't figure you minded Jamison. all though, as you will now notice, moving to the new bloggers seems to make you get a gmail account which screws with your name in the comments. I'm suddenly tied to my old blog, and you're "jazz"

mullinz8 said...

I dig it and having switched to the new blogger some time ago I hated it. I think I’ve got everything figured out now so I like the new set up. I think having the tags will be beneficial in the end.

Keep my name the same as it appears here.