Show us your Categories

by Chris, Fri 30th May, 2008, in categories: Using Blogsome

We last wrote about template tags back in February 2007. Here’s some more stuff you might like to know.

Display your categories

Go to Manage > Files and look in your index.html file. Somewhere, usually in your menu or navigation section, you will see a little piece of code that tells Blogsome to display a list of your blog’s categories. For a basic list, use this:

<ul>{list_cats optionall='1' all='All'}</ul>

For something a bit more interesting, though, take a look at this:

<ul>{list_cats sort_column='name' optioncount='1'}</ul>

In the above example, optioncount=’1′ will show the number of posts for each category after the category’s name. The number is usually shown in brackets.

Use sort_column=’name’ to display categories by name, which is what we do on this blog. If you want to display your categories by their number (go to Manage > Categories, and you will see that each category has a number as well as a name), then you would use sort_column=’ID’ instead.

Here are some more options that you can use in that categories code:

  • optiondates=’1′ displays the date of the last post in each Category. Dates take the form YYYY-MM-DD.
  • children=’1′ will show children (subCategories).
  • children=’0′ will not show subCategories.
  • hierarchical=’1′ will display children (subCategories) in a hierarchical (after parent) list.
  • hierarchical=’0′ will not display subCategories in a hierarchical list.
  • child_of=’4′will display only the Categories that are children of the Category that has the ID number ‘4′.
  • exclude=’3 , 7 ‘will exclude the Categories that have the ID numbers ‘3′ and ‘7′ from the list. Obviously, if you want to exclude one or more categories, just change the ID numbers to suit.
  • feed=’rss’ will display a link after each Category to the Category’s RSS feed.
  • feed_image=’PATH/FILENAME’ will display an image link to the Category feed. Substitute the location of an image (usually a small RSS icon) where it says PATH/FILENAME.

Find your RSS feed link

by Chris, Sat 10th May, 2008, in categories: Using Blogsome

Sometimes, it’s just simple stuff that we want to know. For example, you could be new to the art of blogging (after all, we all have to start somewhere, don’t we?). And one thing that can seem mysterious to novice bloggers is all this stuff about something called ‘RSS’.

First things first. Go to your Dashboard and choose Manage»Files, then look in ‘index.html’. There are loads of things near the top of that file between the <head> and </head> tags. Look for something like this:

<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="RSS" href="{bloginfo show='rss2_url'}" />

Important: Make sure that feed link is in your blog’s code. Otherwise, Google Reader or Bloglines (or whichever RSS reader you use) might not be able to use autodiscovery to find the feed at all. If that code is not in your ‘index.html’ file, put it in.

If you just need to give your RSS feed link to other people, it is exactly the same URL as your blog, but with the word ‘feed’ after it, like this:

http://YOUR_BLOG_NAME.blogsome.com/feed/

Your comments feed (yes, people do sometimes subscribe to a comments feed too) will look like this:

http://YOUR_BLOG_NAME.blogsome.com/comments/feed/