Monday, December 26, 2005

This, here, is what we call a test.

Check this out. If you're a Mozilla Firefox user (and why wouldn't you be?), you can add the oft-desired feature of using categories with your Blogger-based blog. How, you ask? It's the work of a miraculous little Firefox extension called Greasemonkey. If you're a web developer, you're undoubtedly already using Greasemonkey, but if not - it doesn't take a degree in geekism to install it in your browser.

You need:

1. A free del.icio.us account. (If you aren't already using it, Delicious is a social bookmarking web site).

2. A Blogger (or Blogspot) blog.

3. Mozilla Firefox

4. Greasemonkey.

5. The Del.icio.us + Blogger Greasemonkey Script

Once you've got all of the pieces, you can use this tutorial to install everything. In a nutshell:

1. Install Firefox (if you aren't already using it as your web browser).

2. Install the Greasemonkey Firefox extension.

3. Get a del.icio.us account.

4. Install the Del.icio.us + Blogger user script.

5. In your Blogger settings, on the "Formatting" tab, enable the "Show Link Field" option (set it to "yes").

6. Via Firefox and Blogger's web based post creation tool, write a post. ** Important ** - before you click "Publish," be sure to click the "Edit Html" tab. You must be in Edit mode (and NOT "compose" mode) for the cateogry tags to be added to the footer of your post. You can compose your post in the "Compose" tab - just be sure to switch to the "Edit" tab right before you click "Publish Post."

7. The first time you publish, the Greasemonkey user script will ask you a few questions about your del.icio.us account. My recommendations for answers are as follows:

  1. What text do you want to precede / introduce your tags? (For example: "Filed Under:")
  2. Tags that you'd like to add to all your posts (an "anchor tag", such as your blog name, for example - mine is "HellaHoldem"). This is to differentiate your blog tag categories from the rest of your delicious tags (assuming you use delicious for personal bookmarking as well).
  3. What page on del.icio.us would you like the tags to point to? (your top-level account page, or an account+tag+tag page, like "HellaHoldem+handanalysis" or "HellaHoldem+tripreports). If you don't use delicious for bookmarking other than your blog categories, go ahead and use your top-level account page. If you use delicious for more than just blog category bookmarking, I recommend the account+tag option.


8. To complete the cycle, after publishing, click the "Add link to Delicious" hyperlink to add the post to Delicious.

Ta-da! At the bottom of each of your blog posts, you'll see a "Filed Under:" list of category links to your del.icio.us account.
Filed Under:

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