Categories, featured images, and recent posts

[TrustedDeveloper]

Hello all –
Let me begin by saying that Sparkle is the most exciting and intuitive design application I’ve used since iWeb. Having a native WYSIWYG editor for Mac is tremendously fun and allows me to work at the speed of thought. As I work on building my portfolio website, I’ve thought of several features that I’d like to see in a future release. Here are some quick suggestions:

• The introduction of categories and tags to organize posts, along with the option to add them to the navigation menu.
• A Smart Field or block which selectively displays blog entries by category, tag, or author – allowing you to build a dynamic page.
• The eventual introduction of featured images – to be displayed on dynamically generated pages.
• Menus which refresh when updated across multiple pages.

Many thanks to @Duncan and his team!

[duncan]

Hi @TrustedDeveloper, many thanks for the great feedback.

Just a clarification, since menus I’m thinking about do refresh across multiple pages, what do you mean exactly with your last point? What’s the use case?

[esedege]

I do strongly agree with your first two suggestions: blogs as they are right now, lacking built-in tags and/or filters, make them quite basic and force us to do quite workarounds to overcome it.

[duncan]

Maybe I don’t have enough experience with blogs or lack imagination, but I fail to see how tags are so central. Why is that? What’s a great blog that makes effective use of tags?

[esedege]

Hi, Duncan!

A blog tag is a pre-filled search that only searches for other coincident tags, so it filters, facilitates, and focuses the navigation.

Let’s say I have a cuisine blog. My posts are these:

• Classic panna cotta with raspberry coulant. Tags: Italian, dessert, recipe, recipes with oven.
• Seafood paella. Tags: Spanish, rice, seafood, recipe.
• How to easily clean an oven. Tags: oven, tricks.
• Coca de recapte. Tags: Spanish, Catalan, recipe, recipes with oven.
• Ensaimada. Tags: Spanish, dessert, recipe, recipes with oven.

Then someone lands on the Ensaimada post, likes it and wants to know more about my desserts. He/she just has to click on the ‘desserts’ tag to get every dessert I’ve posted. I could also make alternative recipes without milk for those lactose-intolerant people, so I could add ‘lactose-intolerant friendly’ to the existing tags in all those which apply, so clicking on it would filter my posts by that term, making my visitors more engaged and facilitating and tailoring the navigation to their preferences. Or ‘European desserts’, or ‘Desserts with oven’, or…

This is different than making a search, because tags only search for other coincident tags. Even more so, if the visitor wants to make a search maybe he/she doesn’t know what specific terms I have chosen, and it also prevents false positives. Following my example:

• ‘Recipes with oven’ is a tag that when clicked only searches which posts share the same tag; however with a search, if I’ve written ‘recipes’, ‘with’ and ‘oven’ in my post about How to easily clean an oven, it may appear in the standard search results.
• Coca de recapte is a baked flat dough with anchovies, pepper and aubergine on top. It clearly shares a common ancestor with the Italian pizza. However, if I mention ‘Italy’ or ‘Italian’ in my text, the Coca post would appear when searching for Italian food, which it is not.

(I’m not an avid reader of blogs, but I’m working on updating this clunky behemoth of a blog La Eduteca; it’s in Spanish but you can see here a lot of tags at the bottom (Primary Education, 1st grade Spanish, 2nd grade Spanish… and so on) that help teachers and educators find more related content.)

Hope this helps!

PS. I’ve found this blog to help me illustrate, Simply Recipes, that has both tags and an elegant ‘filter by tag’ bar that is probably out of scope, but I hope it aids my point get across. (Tags by themselves as I’ve explained them above would be enough for starters.)

[Mr_Fozzie]

@esedege

this blog to help me illustrate, Simply Recipes , that has both tags and an elegant ‘filter by tag’

Is that still a blog in the original sense? I thought a blog was more like a diary. This looks more like a database for recipes. Or have blogs changed a lot in the meantime?

I don’t currently use a blog, but I am thinking of writing a travel news blog when the travel bans are gone.

Mr. F.

A “super smart field” for the blog index would be great: Instead of the date for certain days, it could read “today” “yesterday” “this week” and then the date for older postings. In the posting itself then the date of the entry.

[esedege]

What you’re thinking of creating is a personal blog, but a blog can be professional and/or institutional; it is defined as a site whose main content consists of a series of posts, usually ordered from newest to oldest, about a certain subject. Simply Recipes may be a notch too fancy, but Duncan asked for a good example of tags.

[Just add the typical “My grandma used to do these cookies whenever I was sad” story at the top of its entries, and you’ll see how it fits. ]

[TrustedDeveloper]

Hello @Duncan,
Sorry I haven’t been on the forum for a long time!
I imagine something like the Recent Posts section in WordPress.
On my website, I have a number of Chinese and French translations.
I would like to have a section which dynamically displays my most recent translations by category.
Though this adds a certain degree of complexity, I think it would make it easier to manage larger websites.
Here’s what it looks like on WordPress:

You can also choose to display the posts as a list or a tile:

Thanks again for all of your hard work!