Friday, October 9, 2009

Blog Indexing

Apple writes about Creating a Blog Index.

Her post made me think about my attempts at organizing the growing information on my blog. Originally, like her, I focused on the labels that Blogger provides (On other blogging systems they are often called categories.) And I had all the labels listed in my sidebar. A list that grew and grew.

Recently Blogger added a feature that allows you to selectively add labels to your sidebar. (It's no longer all or none.) So now I have three listings: 1) Posts by Surnames 2) Posts by Locale 3) Carnivals and Memes. There are many other labels I have used in the past, and continue to use, but they are no longer in the sidebar.

The only 'true' index I have created is an index of my Amenuensis Monday transcriptions, which I have placed on my main website - where I also have created some lists of genealogy resources. This blog may someday leave Blogspot and return to its original location. I moved it here at a time when there was nothing else genealogical on my website and I wanted to make this separate.

The search features Blogger offers eliminates some need for indexing. The search box in the "Blogger bar" doesn't work very well -- it doesn't conduct an every-word search on the posts, and misses a lot. However, the Search Gadget they provide for the sidebar does a much better job. And recently they added the ability to search every page linked to from the blog, as well. I'm not certain how comprehensive this feature is, but it looks impressive.

2 comments:

Charley "Apple" Grabowski said...

Thanks John! I hadn't caught that you could add multiple label widgets and that will help some. I have added the search widget and it does work much better than the old one. I still have the problem that my ancestors spelling was often creative. I have some of my resource links on my sidebar and others in a draft post. Thanks for the reminder that I need to get back to work on them too!

Evelyn Yvonne Theriault said...

I've reorganized my front page several times and this reflects - naturally - the growth of information on my blog.And the fact that my blog has grown in unexpected directions.
For instance, when I started out I intended to integrate all my postcards into genealogy or history posts, but once I found so many people (not all of them family historians) were visiting the site to see the postcards, I made a postcard index.
I "think" I've arrived at my ideal front page organization but I'll have to wait and see a few more months.
Evely in Montreal