Back in action

But who knows for how long. Life got busy there, for a moment.

Anyway, dashboard update: still 90 posts, on my other blog, still 2 posts, on this one (as of right now, I'm guessing it should be somewhere in the low 120's, and 3, respectively).

I've got plenty of other Blogger pet peeves to write about, but I'll save them for later posts. In the meantime, check out witw's post on expandable links, here. This is cool and I hope to find the time to do it with my other blog, sometime real soon. In fact, I may be able to find a way to manipulate the code to solve my "categorical archiving" complaints, but I highly doubt that.

Regardless, this is a feature that Blogger should already have, not one we should have to hack.

Happy holidays.

(as noted on my other blog, Blogger's spell check function does not recognize the term "blog." Nor does it "Blogger." Ha.)

The Dashboard

Ok so its been a couple weeks since I got this thing rolling, sorry about that. I blame work, as usual. Hey, you try working in retail this time of year.

The issue du jour is the Blogger Dashboard. The page you get right when you log on, that gives you some helpful info such as the name(s) of your blog(s), the last updates you made, and the total number of posts you've made (on your given number of blogs).

Is it just me, or does the total posts number only update every few weeks or so. I've been at 90 posts (on my other blog) for the last 5 posts (i.e. I made my 90th post 5 posts ago, but it still says I have only made 90). I was stuck at 79 posts for probably (just guessing) posts 79 through 87 or 88. Regardless of my attempts to refresh the page, it would continue to tell me that I only had 79 total posts.

Argh.

Categorical Archives

One of the first things I ever tried to comment to Blogger about was categorical archiving. Some of Blogger's competition, as well as many personally-hosted blogs, utilize this function to group historical posts under a common category.

An example of this would be movie reviews. I saw a lot of movies this past summer, and posted my thoughts on at least a couple of them, before I got lazy about it. Now, if you wanted to quickly see what I thought about a certain movie, the easiest way would be for you to click on a link on my sidebar that said "My Movie Reviews." It would save you the laborious task of paging through my many months of random blogging just trying to find a random movie review I wrote.

The practicality of this expands to all types of topics, including but not limited to posts on music, arts, sports, subway stories, restaurant reviews, or political opinions, just to name a few.

I tried to find some creative ways to do this when I first realized the option wasn't available, but I'm not html savvy enough to re-write my template to allow this.

A blog about Blogger

Click on the title of this post to find the page that sparked my motivation to create this blog.

I have another blog that I've enjoyed creating here on blogger, and hope to someday host my own blog, when I get good enough at it. But these blogger guys have a good thing going and I'm enjoying surfing their wave in the meantime.

Thing is, you can't contact them. They can't be contacted. Believe me, I've tried. Their "talk to us" page simply doesn't work. Gives you an internal error, every time. Gave me one today, when I sent a note to let them know I was creating this blog, in response to the brokenness of that page.

I hope to post here answers to some of the questions that I've run into in my blogging adventures, as well as known issues that apparently aren't being resolved, issues that have been / are being resolved, and any other helpful hints and/or tips I may be able to offer about using blogger. More to come, shortly.

There may be other blogs out there to this effect, and if so, I'd love to know about them. Feel free to comment with their links, or anything else you might have to share. Cheers!