Creating a Category Tree for Blogger - Part 7

Part 7 - Alternative Multiple List Option

This option does not require you to do any coding, but it will only work well if you have a short number of top categories. On my blog Shark's Short Story Reviews, that is the case. To be specific, I have three top categories: Authors, Topics, Anthologies.

All posts are labeled at least with an author name, and one or more topic labels. If the story came from an anthology which I also want to feature, then I add that label.

I have used the Blogger/Blogspot gadget for creating a list multiple times, once for each top category. The example shown is for Authors. Then choose Selected Labels, and click "edit." This will present you with a list of all your labels, and you can choose the ones which fit the list.



This gives me three separate lists of labels, with the appropriate ones in each top category.



This also takes some maintenance, because every time I add a new author, topic or anthology, I have to remember to go in and edit the list to include that new label.

So, the advantage is that I don't have to do any coding. The disadvantage is that there are multiple lists. However, I decided that on my Short Story Review blog, this really made quite a nice division.

Category Tree Tutorial Index

Creating a Category Tree for Blogger - Part 5

Part 5 - Where Should I Put a Category Tree?

There are two good choices of location for a category tree.

You can put a category tree in one of the sidebars, or you could make it a separate page on those templates which offer good visibility for page tabs. Either of these is easily accessible. Of course, the sidebar option is in full sight, without expecting readers to click to see it, but it will create a large number of links coming off your landing page. Google PageRank may be affected negatively by more than 100 links from a page.

If you haven't done so yet, get rid of any label list or tag cloud widgets. These are now superfluous, and they will be too stuffed to be of much use. I've also removed the archive widget, because finding posts by their chronology is nearly impossible for a long-lived blog too.



To add the category tree to a sidebar
• go to the design page and click "Add a Gadget" in the desired column
• choose HTML/Javascript and click on the + sign
• this will open the box where you can enter your code
• paste in your category tree code
• add a title such as "Category Tree" if desired
• choose save
• you can preview if desired, move the gadget to the desired position in the sidebar, etc. just like any other gadget



To add the category tree to a separate page
• under the "Posting" tab, choose Edit Pages
• click add a new page (up to 10 allowed), and title it as you will- eg. "Categories"
• be sure to chose the "Edit HTML" tab for the editing box (not "Compose")
• paste in your category tree code
• preview if you want, then publish the page

Your category tree has now been created. You can tweak it with spaces, heirarchy, etc. until it looks the way you want. If you have carefully grouped and labeled all your posts, it will offer readers access to all your current content.

There is some maintenance you will need to perform if you add new labels, and that will be the topic of Part 6- Maintaining a Category Tree

Category Tree Tutorial Index

B Stir Dynamic Random Post Widget- Update

I have been using this widget since April 6, but I'm not sure that I'm going to keep it. It delivers what is supposed to be a random post from earlier blog entries to entice readers to sample older entries.

However, I have noticed that the same articles keep showing up with little variation. This is usually the fault of a random seed generator that isn't really random.

B Stir Dynamic Widget

web ad income today (4 blogs, 2 web sites): Adsense $.01 Adgitize $.77 Project Wonderful $.01 ______________________ Total: $.79 Total to date in April $11.78 Total in March $4.88

B Stir Dynamic Random Post Widget

This is a wonderful little addition to a blog that has been around for a long time. It is sometimes difficult to entice readers to look at earlier posts except by links from newer related articles.

The example above I pulled from another of my blogs My Quality Day. The example nicely shows that you can see the date of the original post, and its title, with a line from the beginning of the post. What the example can't show is that this post will show for a few seconds and then fade into a different random selection. This not only catches a reader's eye, but may draw them into reading an older post. The title is clickable, and will open that post in the same window.

This widget is made by Stuff-a-blog, and is called the B Stir Dynamic Widget. It is very easy to install. Follow the link, enter the URL for your blog, enter a keyword. This should be one word that you would say most represents your blog. You can select

• whether you want a "snippet" of text presented or just a title
  
• whether you want a border or not
  
• how many entries to include, 1-5
  
• a trasparent, red, yellow or blue background

The advanced option allows a choice of UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1 coding (don't even bother with this unless you know you need the ISO setting. Then click on the "Dynamic" button below that. This will bring up a box with the code to enter on your blog. You can only put one box on a blog or the coding will get confused. Grab the code and enter it in one of the sidebars on your blog. If you are not comfortable with inserting code there are buttons to help you with Blogger, or Facebook. I'm off to grab one for this blog right now! B Stir Dynamic Widget

web ad income today (4 blogs, 2 web sites): Adsense $.08 Adgitize $.88 Project Wonderful $.03 ______________________ Total: $.99 Total to date in April $-3.75 Total in March $4.88

An Attractive, Useful Nutrition Widget

I stumbled across this widget and I like it a lot. It gives a lot of information about eating well in a compact format that is fun to use and nice to look at. For those of us who learn by visual recall it's a great "poster" of nutritional knowledge.



First of all, you can see at a glance the essential vitamins that we need and generally, in a picture to the outer edge of the wheel beside the letter denoting the vitamin, what foods provide that nutrient.

If you click on either the letter or the food you will see that the text in the bottom box changes. There are five tabs in the bottom box. The one on top is Fruit. When you click on a letter or its corresponding food picture you will see a list of fruits with that vitamin. You may click any of the other tabs. Vegetables or Nuts are similar to the information under Fruits - a list of the foods containing the vitamin.

The next tab is Benefits. You can click there to learn what this vitamin does for your body.

The final tab is Guidelines. This is perhaps not quite as obvious in its meaning. I thought that it would give recommended daily amounts. It does not. But it gives additional food sources; for example, Vitamin B12 is not found in fruit, vegetables or nuts, but rather in meat, fish and dairy products. There is also information under this tab about what problem a deficiency of the vitamin will cause.

For a quick and easy reference, this is hard to beat- much easier than looking at columns of text on a page.

If you want to share this widget, click on the bar at the bottom and social network sites will be displayed. If you want this widget for yourself just click on the star at the bottom of the widget, on the right, or go to Clearspring Vitamin Wheel

web ad income today (4 blogs, 2 web sites): Adsense $.03 Adgitize $.19 Project Wonderful $.03 ______________________ Total: $.25 Total to date in March $16.76

Feedjit Live Stats Widget

I've been using the Feedjit widget for live stats on my other blogs for some time, and I like it a lot. It shows visitors where other visitors have come from. That is fun but the real advantage of Feedjit is that I can log in, off of my blog, and see where the most recent 50 visitors came from, and also if they left by clicking on a link on my blog. It tracks this traffic in real time.



I am adding one to this blog today. This is the image widget (you can also choose the javascript widget for some blog platforms). On the Feedjit "join" page click "Get the Javascript Widget" at the bottom of the column of choices.

There are four choices on this page, but the one I am using is at the far left, "Life Traffic Feed." Click the top line "First Customize It." This is pretty straightforward. If you click on a color square you will be given a palette where you can click on a color, or you can use a hexidecimal code (the pound sign followed by six numbers and or letters) to select the colors. The results will show in the sample widget. So it's easy to match your blog or web page. You can also select the width as long as it's between 160 and 260 pixels. This all relates to what your visitors will see.

Once you are happy with the look of the widget, just grab the code in the little box and paste it into your blog or web site. It will immediately start to track visitors in real time. (There are options for Blogger or Typepad if you don't know how to add the code to your blog)

You can then click the widget where it says "Watch in Real Time" (I like to right-click and open in a new tab) and open a whole page to see those most recent 50 visitors. Of course it starts from when you install it, so it will take a certain amount of time for the queue to fill. From this page you may choose to remove your own IP from the list so that your own location will not keep showing up in the list.



You can see, left to right, whether the line indicates someone coming or leaving, their country's flag, their browser, their operating system, and the logo of the site they came from (if it has an icon). In text their city and state will be shown, the name of the site, and the location on your site where they landed. This might be the general blog page or a permalink. On the right is the running time, and how long ago the visitor came or left. Leaving entries are only recorded if they actually clicked on a link on your site.

It continues to "listen" for traffic, so if someone else comes to your site you will see it appear at the top while all other entries scroll down one line.

web ad income today (4 blogs, 2 web sites): Adsense $.00 Adgitize $.21 Project Wonderful $.06 ______________________ Total: $.27 Total to date in March: $4.62