[Davis County Watch: Announcements] Blog Organized by Topic

If you will look down the sidebar for Davis County Watch, you will now see seven links under the heading 'Davis County Topics'. I've always wished that Blogger had a feature to allow a person to blog by topic. What I didn't realize is that Blogger does allow categories. It just requires some tweaking. Here is what you'll need if you want to blog by topic with Blogger.

Ingredients:

• At least two blogs with Blogger (One Master Blog and one on a specific topic).
• A gmail (email) account.

Steps to a Topical blog with Blogger:

• I setup my gmail account to filter based on an alias. Let's say that your email address is jane.doe@gmail.com. Any email sent to jane.doe+blogthis@gmail will make it into your inbox. You then setup gmail to forward all emails sent to jane.doe+blogthis@gmail to your Mail-to-Blogger Address (i.e. jane.blog.blogger.com)
• Next I go to my master blog. In my case it is Davis County Watch, and I click on the Settings-->email tab. I fill out my Mail-to-Blogger Address (i.e. jane.blog.blogger.com) and I check publish (now anything emailed to this address will automatically be published to my Master Blog.
• If I haven't done it already I go to blogger and create one or more entirely new blogs. I called some of mine Davis County Watch: Announcements (http://daviscountywatch-announcements.blogspot.com)
• I click on Settings-->email tab for one of my topical blogs. I fill out the BlogSend Address with my alias jane.doe+blogthis@gmail. I do this same thing for each of my topical blogs.

That's it! Now anytime I publish to my Announcements, or one of my other topical blogs, then that post will be automatically posted to Davis County Watch as well. I basically trained my topical blogs to blog for me on Davis County Watch.

So, what does this mean for you? It means that you can now click on one of the topics in the sidebar and look at just the topics that interest you. If you aren't at all interested in what I have to say, but want to hear from one of my Guest Bloggers, then you can click on that topic. If you like RSS Feeds, then you can subscribe to only the Feed for the topic that interests you.

I haven't worked out all the kinks yet, but things are looking good. I'm sure I could have chosen some better topics. Rest assured I will be adding more. I spent a lot of time moving most of my old posts under one of the categories, and I discovered that it's hard to categorize everything perfectly. For example, I have a category called Creative Solutions that is full posts about people/politicians doing nasty things. In a sense 'creative' has become a synonym for 'nasty'. On the other hand, I've posted some legitimate, productive, solutions that others have proposed there.

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Posted by Tyler Farrer to Davis County Watch: Announcements at 9/19/2006 07:37:00 AM
Update: I should really have given a hat tip for this hack to Oreilly.com