Categories, Please

After doing the blogging thing for well over a year and a half, I've begun to want more from the blogging platform I use. Blogger keeps adding features, but one thing they haven't added that I really want is categories. You've seen them, mainly on Movable Type blogs; a post will have a category such as general, humor, programming, political, or whatever the particular post is about. Having the posts categorized makes it easier to search older posts, such as, if you only wanted to search the political posts. I was hoping there was a way to get categories in Blogger, but all I've turned up is a needlessly complicated workaround that actually requires you to have multiple blogs.

Yesterday I blundered across a blog with categories that appeared to be using Blogger. It wasn't a Blogspot URL, but you can put your Blogger blog on your own server if you want. The template was one of the array of boring ones Blogger trotted out with the relaunch a few months ago. (I don't like any of the Blogger templates, not even the one I use.) I wondered how he did it. Maybe there was a simple way where I'd just have to add a few lines of code. I considered emailing him and begging the secret out of him. Then I looked at his html and saw he was using WordPress, not Blogger. AARRGGHH!! So I can't have categories at all with Blogger.

For the past couple of weeks I've been experimenting with blogging software that I have to install myself on a server. I've managed to successfully install WordPress, which I love, and Nucleus CMS, which I don't love. I failed miserably in my attempt to install pLog. I didn't even try to install Movable Type. I've been wanting to move my blog off Blogger to somewhere where I have more controll for a long time, practically since the beginning. But after messing around with these different blogging programs a bit, I'm beginning to think that it's better to let other, more qualified people deal with the technical side of things. Blogger's done a good job in keeping up with all of my 1,000-plus posts. If I'd been trying to keep track of all of that stuff, and deal with the other problems, I probably would've lost half of it. So, I've come to the conclusion that I need to move the blog to a solid platform with the features I want, and I don't want to have to worry that company's going to disappear overnight. (Why people use off-brand blogging services I'll never know.) I've decided on TypePad is probably my best bet, but I don't know when I'll be making the move.