Blogger and Categories

Well, my reply from Blogger came through quite quickly (mentioned in an earlier post). There is no category facility in Blogger. That was it!

Today, I have been hunting online for more information about this. It has become more of an issue since I set up another weblog called "Evaluation in Healthcare". This is a site I am using to post tips, ideas and resources for healthcare evaluation which is the day job (no, the posts here are not endorsed or supported by my day job, let's make that clear). I need to be able to define categories so that visitors can find their way around the posts in a useful way.

I wanted to use a similar facility for this site so that I can have categories of reviews, music, poems, views etc etc

Well, after an extensive search using google, it looks like Blogger have no immediate plans for categories. Rumours are that this went on the back-burner when Blogger became part of Google. Is it just me, or does Blogger seem to have wound down since becoming part of Google. Posts to the news section are drying up.

I had an idea earlier this afternoon involving posting a page for each category which would comprise links to posts as they are made. The links page has to be updated each time a new post is made for that category. Each link page can be connected to through a permanent link on the sidebar. It's a clumsy work-around but it would work.

Several people have come up with solutions involving setting up sub-blogs for each category and using email forwarding to link them together which seems incredibly complicated. I'm going to experiment with the links page approach and see how that works. I've also set up a Google alert to let me know if Blogger comes up with a category solution. Looking at the amount of traffic about this subject, it looks long overdue. Blogger must be losing customers to competitors who do provide this facility.