Need blog help please

[Happy Mom]

Hoping someone's out there with a little group blog experience? I want to start a group blog on blogger.com for my church's women's group. But rather than just having a giant list of posts running down the page, I'd like to divide it up into sections. I'd like to have a category/topic list like, "Prayer Requests, Opportunities, Events" running down the left side. From these you would link to another page where everyone would post re: that specific topic.

I don't know how to set up these "category links" down the left side, and am not really sure where the "posts" that we'd put under each category would reside! From what I've read in the blogger HELP menu, it looks like my list of categories are called widgets, but beyond that I can't find anything out.

Am wondering if I need to create a blog for each of my categories/topics, then link each blog back to the widget list on our main blog page? Seems like that's "faking" a tiered or categorie'd blog?

Hope that makes sense. Anyone?? Anyone?? Thanks!

[hguenthe]

I haven't had any experience with doing it myself, but from reading a bunch learning what can and can't be done in blogger, I think I might be able to help you a little.

I would suggest you search for a blogger template that you like which has a section for categories already in it. There are a lot of free (open source) templates out there and some very beautiful ones. One I have seen which does use a section on the side called categories is Creative Art by gosublogger.

I don't know any specific good category widgets in blogger but know that a lot of the nice templates out there have it built in.

When you have one that you like, when you write your post, you will give the post a "label" which matches your category labels. That will tell the widget where to file the post under.

So I believe it is all done under the one blog but just giving each post a label so that the widget knows how to filter what posts to show when.

Does that answer your question and make sense?

[Happy Mom]

Perfect sense ... per your suggestion I've just found a template like you've described and am working with it right now! Thanks for pointing me in this direction, not sure why I didn't think of that to begin with!