Changes To This Here Blog

After a while of try­ing to fig­ure out how I want­ed it, I final­ly did some­thing use­ful with cat­e­gories today.

As you can see in the sec­ondary and ter­cia­ry nav­i­ga­tion links at left (between this col­umn and the pho­to), I’ve expand­ed the sin­gle “Categories” link, which links to a cat­e­go­ry index, to include links to the indi­vid­ual cat­e­gories. More impor­tant­ly, each post now dis­plays its cat­e­go­ry (or cat­e­gories) in all index­es as well as promi­nent­ly with­in the indi­vid­ual post page. Click the title of this post to see the latter.

I’ve also tweaked a num­ber nav­i­ga­tion­al and UI ele­ments site-wide. For a full list­ing see About: Site: Timeline.

I’m pret­ty excit­ed about the addi­tion of user-viewable cat­e­gories to the blog. I get fre­quent requests for eas­i­er access to more of my fic­tion, and my posts about Quark v. InDesign are incred­i­bly pop­u­lar and often ref­er­enced around the world. Now they’re eas­i­er to find.

I want to add cat­e­go­ry Trackback capa­bil­i­ties and list­ings some­where, some­how, but I’m not entire­ly sure how to go about it. It isn’t the code that has me stopped–I can grok through that pret­ty eas­i­ly. It’s more of the user inter­face and place­ment. I mean, where would be a good place for a list of cat­e­go­ry Trackback pings? Should I put a “see also” in each post in a giv­en cat­e­go­ry? Should I cre­ate a pop­up? Should I add it to the cat­e­go­ry archive page? I don’t know. Part of it is that I’m not real­ly sure what I’d be look­ing at once the list did start to populate.

It would be a big help if I could see oth­ers’ imple­men­ta­tion of Trackback lists, espe­cial­ly at the cat­e­go­ry lev­el. If you know of any sites dis­play­ing Trackback lists, again, espe­cial­ly cat­e­go­ry Trackback lists, please let me know. I’d real­ly like to see what they’ve done. You can also respond to my post on the Movable Type forum.