I sent the following message to the Blogger “Talk To Us” page this evening:
Dear Blogger–
First off, I just want to say thanks for the service. I’m sure you hear that all the time, but it bears mentioning again: blogger has been a fantastic resource for lots of my writing projects and my teaching.
Second, I have a suggestion. How about allowing users to set up categories for different posts, kind of along the lines of what MovableType allows? For example, when I was using MT, I had categories about teaching, about scholarship, about being a “happy academic,” about computers, etc. It’s about the only feature I miss from MT because it made it easy for me to organize entries and allowed readers to just browse a particular category.
So, what do you say? Wouldn’t categories be cool?
Your pal,
–Steve
Steven D. Krause
Associate Professor, Department of English Language and Literature
Eastern Michigan University * Ypsilanti, MI 48197
http://krause.emich.edu
This has been sort of on my mind as of late because I’m itchin’ to do a bit of blog remodeling. Fortunately (or unfortunately), I’m pretty swamped with work, so the last thing I have time to do is embark on messin’ with the layout/configuration/code here. I toy with the idea of going back to MT or learning Drupal or this thing that Bill H-D is using for the WIDE Research Center at MSU, Plone.
But I’ll probably stick with Blogger, even if they don’t give me categories any time soon. From my point of view, the big advantage of an open source product like MT is you have a huge amount of control. You are King (or Queen) of the castle, Master (or Mistress) of your domain. When I was running this blog with MT, I thought that was pretty cool. On the other hand, running your own content management software means that you are not only the King and Master, but you are also the chief tech support person, the general contractor, and the janitor. I’m not that thrilled when Blogger causes me trouble, but I was even less thrilled when MT caused me trouble.
And besides, while Haloscan seems to have erased a bunch of old comments, I still don’t have much in the way of spam problems with Blogger. But if they could just let me have categories….
Oh well, if Mr. Blogger writes back with a meaningful answer, I’ll let you know what she/they/he say.