Blogger Categories with Del.icio.us Part Three

Update April 11, 2007 - This methods/scripts etc described in this post are obsolete. Do Not Use Them! They relate to a category method for Blogger BEFORE Blogger introduced their labels. Use New Blogger, Use Labels. This is just up for historical reasons, or if someone using the code already needs it. Comments are now Closed. Thanx.

 Part One
 Part Two
 Part Three

May 4-2006 UPDATE: These scripts have been outdated, and an updated and improved can be found at the post delicious2Blogger - Categories for Blogger. I highly recommend looking at the new setup/scripts and using them if you are interested in this method of categories for blogger. Previous users of the older scripts, please see the note at that post about converting over. I will leave these setups/scripts up and available for those already using them. ---

This is the last in the series on using del.icio.us for categories with Blogger. If you are here you should have already implemented part one and part two or this won't be much help. This last post will cover cloaking the category post and the archive it is in so it won't be normally visible. I'll also cover some template tweaks for the category post page itself that I implemented that may or may not be useful to others.

If you have the first two methods implemented and you want to add the tweaks in this section, I strongly advise to backup the current working template before trying these. None of this is hard at all, but the formatting is a little funky and very easy to screw up (trust me on that ...I know from exp) and a working copy of what you had before you started with this section could come in handy...just in case.

Ok, first hiding the category post so it never shows in the "Recent Posts" lists and the same with it's archive so it won't show in the "Archive List". Note:this currently only covers lists NOT in a drop-down menu. If your recent posts or archive list are in a drop-down I'll have to get back to you. Not a big deal, I just haven't got around to it yet.
UPDATECode for hiding the category post and archive now available at the post Drop Down Menu For Categories
Now find in your template where the recent posts list is. It should look something like this.

<ul id="recently">
<BloggerPreviousItems>
<li><a href="<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>"><$BlogPreviousItemTitle$></a></li>
</BloggerPreviousItems>
</ul>

Now if the ul in your code doesn't have the id="recently" then add it. The ul needs that id for the following code to work. Next, copy and paste the code below right underneath your recent post lists in your template.

<script type="text/javascript">
// Cloak the Delicious Tag Post
      rec = document.getElementById('recently').getElementsByTagName('a');
      for(i=0; i < rec.length; i++){
      if(rec[i].href == delTagPost){
                rec[i].parentNode.style.display = 'none';
               }
       }
</script>

This bit just just cycles through the recent post list and if it finds the category post it makes that li element not display. Similar thing for the archive list. It will probably look something like this.

<ul id="archive-list">
<BloggerArchives>
<li><a href="<$BlogArchiveURL$>"><$BlogArchiveName$></a></li>
</BloggerArchives>
</ul>

Again if your code's ul doesn't have the id="archive-list" then add that as the next script needs that id to work on. Then copy and paste this code underneath the archive list. Note that in testing I just saw that the Blogger Minima templates have the archive ul with a CLASS of "archive-list" out of the box...this should be changed to ID or it won't work.

<script type="text/javascript">
// Cloak the Delicious Archive Post
          arc = document.getElementById('archive-list').getElementsByTagName('a');
          for(i=0; i < arc.length; i++){
          if(arc[i].href == delArchivePost){
                arc[i].parentNode.style.display = 'none';
                }
           }
</script>

Exact same thing happens here, when the archive containing the category post is found that element is hidden from view. That way this "special" category post and archive won't normally be viewed/accessable from these menus. (Yes it does rely on javascript...if a user dont' have scripting turned on it won't be hidden, but they won't get the category functions either).

These last bits are some more tweaking for the category post itself. May or may not be useful to others, but for my uses there were certain bits on the category post page I didn't want displayed or I wanted to modify.
The first part was the date header on that page, since this page is performing a special function the date isn't really relevant to it and I didn't want it shown here. Here's what I did, I gave the ItemPages only a unique ID that I could manipulate with scripting. This looks a little odd, because it embeds a conditional <ItemPage> tags inside an element, and it's easy to mess up the format so be careful here if you do this. So find the element containing your date, mine looked like this, yours most certainly will be a bit different.

<div class="post-date">

and I added a unique id to it for the ItemPage's only with this snippet of code

<ItemPage>id="delpost-date"</ItemPage>

 so it looks like this

<div class="post-date" <ItemPage>id="delpost-date"</ItemPage>>

Again if you go this route, it's easy to get those tags out of whack a bit, since it's very oddly formatted. Myself it was easy to knock off the trailing >, but if you take it slowly you should get it inline. Just copy what's between the ItemPage tags and insert it right before the > in the date's containing element. If you do it and the format of your page falls apart, you know you've screwed it up, checking in the preview should tell you whether everything goes south. When there is an error it's usually VERY noticeable. :-)

I also wanted to do basically the same thing with the post title area (So it will write out the selected category when displaying) and to the post's footer section since it's not really relevant to this post either. If you wanna go that route for the post title you again use the <ItemPage> tags to add an id of delpost-title to the element containing your post-titles. Here's the code

<ItemPage>id="delpost-title"</ItemPage>

 And mine ends up looking like this...yours will most likely have different elements or class names. The idea is the same.

<div class="post-title" <ItemPage>id="delpost-title"</ItemPage>>

And for the footer I add an id of delpost-footer

<ItemPage>id="delpost-footer"</ItemPage>

so it comes out like for me, again yours will be slightly different.

<div class="post-footer" <ItemPage>id="delpost-footer"</ItemPage>>

If you get this far now just add this script inside or after the post-footer section.

<script type="text/javascript">
selURL = unescape(document.location);
selected = selURL.split('?');
if (selected[0] == delTagPost){
document.getElementById('delpost-footer').style.display = 'none';
}
</script>

This little snippet will hide the post footer if wanted on the category post page only. The other bits, hiding the date and writing the category selected in the post title area are in the initial script that you made the category page with, just waiting for the correct id's to be added to the proper segments to do their work.

I think that's about it. I probably should mention some of the limits of del.icio.us. I haven't found a limit to the number of tags (categories) it will display, although I suspect there must be one. I've tested this with accounts that use more than 100 and they all show up, so maybe it's unlimited, maybe not. My advice is to not just shotgun everything into a zillion categories. Adding a post to multiple categories is fine but make it relevant and don't go creating a bunch of niche categories, unless you're really gonna use them.

Additionally,there is a limit to the number of posts that will display in a selected category, and that is 100..this is a limit imposed by  del.icio.us , and I suppose it could change if they decide to. It could go up, it could go down. It could stay the same. They're in control of that. So if you fill up a category  you can still add to it, but I believe the newest post will show up while the oldest gets kicked out of the list. I suppose if you get that far that maybe you could create another category...like if you filled up Humor go to Humor2 or something. I'm a long way from that so I haven't thought much about it yet.

Anyway if you find a mistake in my instructions (almost certain) or in the scripts I posted ( oh I tried very hard not to miss anything, and tested as much as possible,  but it's very likely I have missed something for a certain situation) then lemme know in the comments. If it's something I can fix I'll try to when I can.

Tags: Blogger || Del.icio.us || Phydeaux3