Categorically speaking
Under the category of “Assumptions” I would have thought that if there were one part of the Blogcast that wouldn't pose any problems it would be that of categories and how they are used or even if they should be used. Well after some feedback and chats with some new Blogcast users it looks like I need to come up with another category. (Things we thought we knew)
Why Categorize?
While it depends on the nature of your blog, categorization of posts is usually a good choice. Even if your dedicated to one field, you'll likely address various facets of that topic over time and breaking them up into related sections make it easier for your audience to track. Providing additional fodder for the search engines to digest is an added bonus of doing so. Adding categories also provides a way for people to read only the material they find of interest. Don't take offense - not everyone is going to share all of your passions and enthusiasm for every topic. But for those finding a post via a search engine, categorization gives them an easy way to find your similar posts.
A tag, is a keyword is a category?
While the above terms can be used interchangeably, it can be said that there is no such thing as a synonym. When we leave the physical world and go online, this is closer to the truth than most realize. While single acts of tagging and categorization look very much alike, the intent behind them differs.
Ultimately an item in the world has to possess a physical location (e.g . you can't have a single copy of an Italian travel guide with recipes be on the cooking, tourism or books about Italy shelf). Since we're no longer constrained by physical space when it comes to assigning categories, it opens up relationship possibilities that would be prohibitively expensive or unlikely to exist in the real world. Our book now appears on searches for recipes, Italy, tourism, travel, wine, cheese, etc. Just about anything you make a connection to can be used to point back towards that one item and we can apply this to our blogs and podcasts.
Podcaster's especially should take advantage of any meta data they can add around their audio and video files since most search engines can't see into your audio/ video.
A category can be seen as the best fit choice for a single item.
A tag is a one of a collection of related ideas surrounding an item.
Blogcast allows you the choice of how you handle these, either posting to single categories or tagging each post with multiple categories.
Some tips on how to get the most out of your categories.
Merging Categories.
You are not stuck with your initial choices so don't be stingy in assigning categories, as you can always change them later. If you blog about cars and started off on a long list of categories for Porsche, Audi, VW, Mercedes, BMW, you could merge these all into one “German Autos” by going into:
Manage Blog> Categories and then checking the categories you wish to merge. Select “combine categories from the drop down menu and then apply. A dialog box appears and asks you for the new category that will be created from your selection. Note - your original categories are no longer present and all posts are updated to reflect the merge category.
Updating Prior posts:
If you have only recently started adding categories then the question of how to add them to your prior entries don't take long to surface. We've been there, programmed that, but sadly our T shirt order was never fulfilled. Within the manage entries > entries view you can select all the entries that you wish to add a category to, select “Add entries to category” form the drop down list, enter in the category and save it. All selected posts have now updated with this additional category.
Renaming Categories:
While I was perusing our feedback mail, yes we really read every one, I noticed that there's no direct way to edit a category within Blogcast. While that's likely not to be a situation that lasts too long, it's time for a workaround using our merge category feature above. Take your category with the typo, or a term that wasn't as useful as you thought it would be and select it, merge, and then place your new category name within get this workaround while it's hot as I am hoping to have it fixed soon.
Well that's enough sorting out for the time being. Until next time.
Tag! You're it.
Why Categorize?
While it depends on the nature of your blog, categorization of posts is usually a good choice. Even if your dedicated to one field, you'll likely address various facets of that topic over time and breaking them up into related sections make it easier for your audience to track. Providing additional fodder for the search engines to digest is an added bonus of doing so. Adding categories also provides a way for people to read only the material they find of interest. Don't take offense - not everyone is going to share all of your passions and enthusiasm for every topic. But for those finding a post via a search engine, categorization gives them an easy way to find your similar posts.
A tag, is a keyword is a category?
While the above terms can be used interchangeably, it can be said that there is no such thing as a synonym. When we leave the physical world and go online, this is closer to the truth than most realize. While single acts of tagging and categorization look very much alike, the intent behind them differs.
Ultimately an item in the world has to possess a physical location (e.g . you can't have a single copy of an Italian travel guide with recipes be on the cooking, tourism or books about Italy shelf). Since we're no longer constrained by physical space when it comes to assigning categories, it opens up relationship possibilities that would be prohibitively expensive or unlikely to exist in the real world. Our book now appears on searches for recipes, Italy, tourism, travel, wine, cheese, etc. Just about anything you make a connection to can be used to point back towards that one item and we can apply this to our blogs and podcasts.
Podcaster's especially should take advantage of any meta data they can add around their audio and video files since most search engines can't see into your audio/ video.
A category can be seen as the best fit choice for a single item.
A tag is a one of a collection of related ideas surrounding an item.
Blogcast allows you the choice of how you handle these, either posting to single categories or tagging each post with multiple categories.
Some tips on how to get the most out of your categories.
Merging Categories.
You are not stuck with your initial choices so don't be stingy in assigning categories, as you can always change them later. If you blog about cars and started off on a long list of categories for Porsche, Audi, VW, Mercedes, BMW, you could merge these all into one “German Autos” by going into:
Manage Blog> Categories and then checking the categories you wish to merge. Select “combine categories from the drop down menu and then apply. A dialog box appears and asks you for the new category that will be created from your selection. Note - your original categories are no longer present and all posts are updated to reflect the merge category.
Updating Prior posts:
If you have only recently started adding categories then the question of how to add them to your prior entries don't take long to surface. We've been there, programmed that, but sadly our T shirt order was never fulfilled. Within the manage entries > entries view you can select all the entries that you wish to add a category to, select “Add entries to category” form the drop down list, enter in the category and save it. All selected posts have now updated with this additional category.
Renaming Categories:
While I was perusing our feedback mail, yes we really read every one, I noticed that there's no direct way to edit a category within Blogcast. While that's likely not to be a situation that lasts too long, it's time for a workaround using our merge category feature above. Take your category with the typo, or a term that wasn't as useful as you thought it would be and select it, merge, and then place your new category name within get this workaround while it's hot as I am hoping to have it fixed soon.
Well that's enough sorting out for the time being. Until next time.
Tag! You're it.
Posted by Blogcast Admin at 10/3/2007 10:11 AM 
Categories: Tutorials, Explanations, Things we thought we knew, Categorically speaking, Power Tips
Categories: Tutorials, Explanations, Things we thought we knew, Categorically speaking, Power Tips
Right on thanks for the info.
What QuickBlog REALLY, REALLY needs is a forum where QuickBlog owners can share information and talk about QuickBlog.
What do you think?
World's">http://www.acreativedesktop.com">World's most creative website
Greetings Austin,
It's an idea that's being looked at , we do have forum software within out Website Tonight program, and I hope to have an announcement on the blog regarding that in an upcoming post.
Regards
John
Quick Blog team.
Even if your dedicated to one field, you'll !!YOU'RE dedicated!!
Greetings,
I'm puzzled , are you referencing a grammar error that slipped through on our side?
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast team.
You're not the only one.
Well Frank, elaborate...
Having recently danced The Category Shuffle with dire results it feels like you are talking directly to me. Thanx for your clarity and always quick response.
I find the Category Archives feature really useful. However, I notice that the page for each Category only has the header information for each post. The reader has to click [Read Article] to see the post. Then they are directed to a new page.
Is it possible for a Category page to have all the articles open, like a home page for each Category?
Thanks!
David
David,
It's currently not possible within that view at present. Over the course of a year or three people have amassed a vast number of posts on their blog and while we don't currently have pagination on the pages it would get hideously slow to try and display hundreds of posts in each category. It's something we need to take a look at,even if only adding top 2-3 lines of each post, so the reader gets a better idea of what they are clicking towards.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast.
Why does the category listing not remember the case that you originally typed it in? For instance, I said Photoshop, and now it is in all caps!
Greetings Akira,
Thanks for your recent question with regards to the category capitilization. What you're seeing is indeed the case but it's one of those things that "looks odd" but it's as designed, ok it's as designed but maybe not as envisioned with regards to how it works. All of our categories share the same name space , i,e they are not unique to your blog so my category "test" is the same one you have. While we're not doing anything with this presently the idea is across all of our blogs we could then show the latest 10 posts in a category for example.
The first person to "claim" temp did so in lower case and since in the database we see "Temp and temp" , in this case as the same thing" we're looking up "Temp" seeing that it exists and returning "temp"
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast Team
NEW EDITING of BLOG POSTS
BAD
Hard to use and a Pain.
Please put back to Old way easier to use. It takes me twice as long to edit than before.
Thanks for your time
Greetings,
The new editor is modeleled closely on the old one and I'm wondering what specifically that you could do prior that is works differently from the prior editor so we can improve this one further.
Regards
John
QBC team.
While you guys are on that subject I have noticed a few challenges.
Now when I go back into an entry to edit my PPC javascript ad codes disappear. If I edit a post and remember to re-enter the ad code again all works well.
If I go back into an entry to make an edit, when I post the edited entry there seems to be all kinds of font tags added. I know I'm not the best at coding but I've never had that problem in the past when creating my past 250 blog entries.
Thanks in advance for your great CS! (we all know what that stands for)
Greetings,
The stripping of the Adsense Javascript is something that we're currently investigating and we're looking towards a resolution of that soon.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast
HELP!! I can no longer enter my Google Adsense code at the end of my articles. Your "new" editor automatically removes the javascript. This is not ok. I need an immediate solution!
Greetings Scott,
We're taking a look at that now. It's not our intent to prevent you ability to place this content in to your article and as soon as we can restore that ability we'll have it back into the Blogcast.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast
Addendum.
This has now been restored to allow scripts.
Regards
John
QBC team
Quick blog really needs the option of going to the next page while still viewing the blog exserpts complete and not just the Heading. I think you should be able to see the complete excerpt of each post, NOT just the title of the post.
Also, why can't the main page have an option to take you to the next page of previous complete posts?? I hate the title only, it looks cheesy.
Lionel,
I agree with you on these points that a navigation between pages is needed and it's on the list for a future version. The excerpt is an issue since some people go OTT with them ,practically excerpting the entire article , and then it comes down to our choice on how many lines get displayed which is why we've not done that yet. For people with hundreds, some into the thousands of posts trying to show them all at once is rather slow which is why we have that view. Until we get the first part of request in place it may not make sense to allow full excerpts on pages set to show all posts. Thanks for the feedback.
Regards
John
QBC team
Thanks for the response John. When you guys take care of the navigation between pages. What if you limited the # of posts per page rather than the length of the excerpt. This way maybe only 10-20 posts need to load per page and your customers could use the entire excerpt they need to. Just a thought.
Thanks again,
Lionel
I've read through this thread and I don't think my following question's been addressed, but pardon me if it has.
I made a typo in one of my category headings the first time I used it . . . typing "chocolate" instead of "Chocolate" . . . and I've tried to use your suggested work-around for correcting typos . . . merging the "chocolate" category with another category and naming the new combined category "Chocolate" . . . but it automatically reverts to "chocolate." Is there any way to fix this and make my category name begin with an uppercase "C"?
Greetings,
No need for a pardon this is an odd situation that's arose more than once. This is one of those situations that looks really easy for us to do on the back end but what's currently there is intentional confusion on our part and one which I'm hoping we can make a little more obvious in a future version.
It's a great idea but we've yet to enact it on a system wide basis.
Regards
John
QBC Team
What exactly is the difference between threaded and linear comments? When I change it from one to the other in settings, I don't see any changes.
Greetings,
Firstly an example using this blog which is using the threaded option. This means that my reply to your comment goes directly underneath yours and is indented to show that there's a link, or a thread between the items.
If this was set to linear there would be no such indent and it would look like another comment and would appear above yours since. So with recent comments there does appear to be little difference in how they appear. Were this becomes useful is three months from now. If someone was to reply to a comment in threaded mode it's tied directly to the comment and in linear it would appear completely out of context.
In summation:
Linear show the comments ordered based on the time they were received(newest at top) and threaded shows them based on the comment they were in reponse to, regardless of the passage of time. For most people threaded makes more sense which is why we default to that option.
Regards
John
QBC Team.
Thanks John,
Thats what I needed to know.
I am trying to decide between a blog or a forum. I like the idea of the blog because you can add pics, videos etc.but really need the features of a forum.
I run a chamber of commerce, and need to have minimally, about 20 different categories that can be responded to and discussed. I'd appreciate any suggestions. Thanks
Greetings,
I'm just back from blog.websitetonight.com where I just answered a similar inquiry though in your case It looks like I am heading towards recommending a forum and a blog. E.g post the main news items the topic starters, images, videos on the blog and then create the same 20 categories within a forum and link the post to them.
This really comes down to the kind of discussion you are trying to facilitate. Blogs are good for the many communicating back to the few while forums are great for many people discussing the same topic in one place. Obviously there's a lot of similarity in basic functions but a good forum offering can possess some very "blog like" behavior more so than the inverse. There is a third way
Regards
John
QBC team