How Does Kottke Put His Sidebar Links Inline With His Longer Entries?

January 31, 2004 6:57 AM

How do sites like Kottke put their sidebar links inline with their weblog entries?
posted by srboisvert to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

I can't speak for j.ko, but if I wanted to do the same thing, I would treat a batch of links as plain old content in a "links" category rather than as a sidebar, and then fiddle my CMS to use a particular template for that category.
posted by majick at 7:22 AM on January 31, 2004

Kottke says he did it like this.
posted by willnot at 7:47 AM on January 31, 2004

The key bit from that link:

What I've actually done is created 5 separate weblogs with MT and, using a bunch of MT plugins (MTSQL, Compare, MTAmazon, ExtraFields, etc.), have aggregated the 5 weblogs on the front page of the site.

Ouch, ouch, ouchy-ouch. At that point, adding per-category templates to your favorite CMS is probably not such a big deal. Is it really true that the ever popular Movable Type, raved about from hilltops, doesn't have entry templates with conditionals?
posted by majick at 8:07 AM on January 31, 2004

There are several plugins to do conditional templates, as mentioned in that thread on Jason's site. Jason just had a particular way of wanting to do that, but if I were doing the same thing, I'd probably use Matt Kingston's solution.
posted by anildash at 10:03 AM on January 31, 2004

Here's how Jeff Veen does it, which I know a lot of people are using on their own blog.
posted by mathowie at 10:58 AM on January 31, 2004

If I were to do it, I'd do it by applying a CSS style derived from the name of a category.
posted by kindall at 2:06 PM on January 31, 2004

I do it with MT this way:

1. I created a new weblog for my side links.

2. Placed a PHP code snippet in the sidebar of my main weblog that takes posts from my links weblog and parses a display of the "x" most recent.

If you just want a real simple display, I think this is the way to go. No MT Plugins or anything like that needed.

Feel free to email me if you'd like a copy of the code snippet or a few more details on just how it was done.
posted by sixdifferentways at 2:57 PM on February 3, 2004