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

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

srboisvert — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 06:57:56 -0800

How do sites like Kottke put their sidebar links inline with their weblog entries?

By: majick

majick — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 07:22:10 -0800

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.

By: willnot

willnot — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 07:47:10 -0800

Kottke says he did it like this.

By: majick

majick — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 08:07:41 -0800

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?

By: anildash

anildash — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 10:03:38 -0800

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.

By: mathowie

mathowie — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 10:58:40 -0800

Here's how Jeff Veen does it, which I know a lot of people are using on their own blog.

By: kindall

kindall — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 14:06:46 -0800

If I were to do it, I'd do it by applying a CSS style derived from the name of a category.

By: sixdifferentways

sixdifferentways — Tue, 03 Feb 2004 14:57:58 -0800

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.