Help me alphabetize my blog links dynamically.

November 8, 2006 11:31 PM

I want to be able to set up links to my blog posts by letters in the alphabet, is there an easy way to do this?

I have a blog that consists solely of invented words. For ease of navigation I would like to make all the posts come up under their corresponding letter. I would also like to able to do this on an ongoing basis.

The only solution I can currently come up with is tagging each post specifically and then hand-building an alphabet to pull all those tagged links when a letter is clicked. But there has to be a better and cooler way to do it.

posted by fenriq to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Could you not just have 26 categories from A-Z, and then sort your entries by category?
posted by Robot Johnny at 12:09 AM on November 9, 2006

What kind of blogging software are you using?
posted by robcorr at 12:20 AM on November 9, 2006

I've had a lot of experience with this very issue. In most blog software apps, your best bet is to create the categories or tags from A to Z, and sort thereby. When you add an entry, make sure it's tagged with the right category, and bob's your metaphorical uncle.

It's a lot easier (in the short-term at least) than writing something programatically to infer the letter. It also allows you to handle individually the edge cases where the first letter may not be the preferred choice (e.g. "The Shining" would be inferred to start with T not S; "24 Boozenap" could be filed under T not 2...)
posted by julen at 7:40 AM on November 9, 2006

The blog is currently on Blogspot which doesn't have categories. Yeah, I should get on a real blog engine. Maybe this is a sign to switch over to Wordpress.
posted by fenriq at 10:31 PM on November 9, 2006

A quick update, I've imported the Blogspot blog into Wordpress, added the A-Z categories and then added each post to its categories and voila. Easy, instant all the words starting with A in the A's.

And damn, Wordpress is nice. I wish I could import my big blog into it but I've heard horror stories about blogs with thousands of posts never making it through the import process.
posted by fenriq at 7:08 AM on November 16, 2006