I’ve been working on some cool feature enhancements to my blog the last couple days. Yesterday I finally assigned all my old posts to a category (and created the new television category), and I added the view archives by category listing on the home page (that includes the total number of posts associated with that category). I also began to work on an “Other Posts in This Category” feature that I didn’t get working until today, when I came across the related entries plugin and installed it. It works spendidly.
Now you can look at an individual post (like yesterday’s) and see the last 10 entries in the same category. Cool stuff.
Another idea I’d like to implement is one I saw on someone else’s blog yesterday: Display the entry’s category name next to each title, like this: category | title.
Lastly, the other feature I implemented yesterday is the display of month, category, or post title on the corresponding template, like this: gabeanderson.com: life: XXX (where XXX represents not pornography or Vin Diesel‘s latest movie, of course, but the page you happen to be viewing, whatever it is).
The other thing I realized today is that my MT templates can incorporate PHP code (duh). So I put this to immediate use by stripping out my counters and sidebar into separate PHP files; then I used an include in my main MT template. The sidebar include is especially helpful, since now I’m pointing to the same PHP file used by the rest of my site (whereas previously I was updating the navigation and favorites in two separate places).
