Blog Categories at Last

If you'll scroll down a ways on my left sidebar, you'll see a new section entitled surface tension, where you'll find a list of categories for my blog, Fiction and Games and Dreams and Linux and Rants and whatnot. This is something I've had on my mind for a long time now: pulling together a list of categories for my blog.

Turns out New Blogger is good for something after all. Yesterday afternoon I worked my way through all 760-plus posts on this blog, dating back to November 2004. Wherever I found a likely post, I assigned a label to it, from a working list of 20 or so labels that I've been developing for some time now. Then I added to my sidebar links to searches on those labels. And voilà!

These categories are still very much a work in progress. I'll be adding, subtracting, moving items for some time to come. Probably adding or subtracting categories, too: "Links" could go. I could add a category entitled either "Privacy" or "Freedom" or "Fatherland Security." I have so much on computers that I split it into Linux, and Computers (which is just anything computer related that doesn't pertain to Linux). I tried not to assign a post to more than one category, though in some instances I couldn't avoid it. Much of my Fiction could also have gone in "Best Of." And many of the posts under Games could also have fit under Pictorial. Early on in my blogging I made a number of posts about my Gear, though looking at the category now it seems rather sparse.

And Doors of Perception is, with apologies to Aldous Huxley, a catchall category for anything related to my "radioactive core meltdown of the imagination." You may not see the connections between all the posts in that category, but I do.

One technical problem, these category lists will display only the 20 most recent entries. There's supposed to be a link to "Next 20" at the bottom of the page, but there isn't, because I'm still using my painstakingly customized old template under New Blogger. Seems my choices are (1) go to a New Blogger template, and lose all my customizations; (2) figure some way to work around it; or (3) go back to square one and adopt a completely different approach, such as links to dummy blog posts for Games, Dreams, Rants, etc. Time will tell.

BTW, before anyone asks... surface tension is taken, like most of the other headings on this blog, from the science fiction writings of James Blish.