How to add categories in Blogger

Unlike other popular blog services like TypePad and WordPress, Blogger does not include built-in support for blog categories. This is a big strike against Blogger. Categories make blogs much easier to navigate by topically organizing posts in an easy-to-access list.

You can find a number of workarounds to this problem on the web. Categories via Technorati tags is one example.

However, I haven't found anything as elegant and easy to use as David Nicholson's solution, posted at Where Magic Lives. With his approach, which employs a nifty Ajax technique, you add some simple code to your template, and then add a transparent one-pixel image (he has the code for this too) to each post that you want to categorize. It's as easy as that.

I tried his solution myself last night, and it works great. One thing I learned during the process: it's best not to put the pixel code at the beginning of your blog entry. This is because it makes a small "empty spot" at the beginning of a paragraph. It's better to put it at the end of a paragraph, preferably one that ends with a short line of text.

Tags: Blogger blog categories blogging