Category Pages and Navigation Bar
by Michael Camilleri
I was talking about doing something involving Mini-Sites but based on feedback so far decided instead to make the categories that I use here a little more visible. Categories have always been a part of the site but I’m not sure how many people realise how to access them or how to use them to find more content that might interest them. To that end there’s now a navigation bar at the top of every page that can quickly take you to the more popular sections of the site. There are new category pages for Issues, Personal and Technology that give you not only a longer preview of the latest entry but also a convenient list of the past few posts in that area.
Let me know if you think this is working or not. I’m still undecided if I should post more often with quick thoughts or instead stick to more considered responses.
Update: I neglected to mention that the code that powers the navigation bar at the top came from Brian McCallister. Thanks Brian!
Comments
Not bad… although was it a concious decision to omit some Categories?
Yeah, it was. I might add more to the list as the site grows. At the moment I wanted to add the sections I thought most people would be interested in. Also, since posts are often cross-posted I didn’t want to add, say, ‘Teaching’ and ‘Personal’ since everything in the former would be in the latter.
Another idea is to trim the number of categories. If I’m not writing anything in ‘Japan’ that isn’t in ‘Personal’ I might get rid of ‘Japan’.
Whoh, Dude… they moved.
Can you line them up with the rest?
I don’t think I’m following you, Chris. What’s moved?
Just for a while, the category titles were lined up vertically along the left-hand edge, above the inkq.net logo. Maybe it was just my browser being silly.
Ah, that’s not your fault; that’s the web server. My host is pretty reliable but it’s not always the fastest. Sometimes if it’s too slow your browser seems to render the page without the associated stylesheet and that gives you the weird vertical menu thing.
Or it could be the code is borked. But since I got it from a professional web developer’s site I’m more willing to blame Modhost.