How do I handle links and categories and blogroll?
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I do not understand at all how my blog handles links and blogroll. I have very many questions.
What I want is a table of websites that I refer to and recommend, to be displayed or easily accessed from my home page.
There seem to be two options: (1) one or more widgets on the sidebar; (2) a menu item labelled “Links”.Option (1), on the sidebar:
I have two Links widgets in use, labelled “Climate Change” and “Manilla NSW”. These do roughly what I want. I would prefer them both to have a first-order title “Blogroll” because that is how they are labelled on other blogs. I don’t know how to achieve this, or if it can be done.
It would make sense to me to have just one “Links” widget with a main heading “Blogroll” and items arranged under sub-headings “Climate Change” and “Manilla NSW” and perhaps further sub-headings. Can that be done?
What alternative choices are available in using this option?
I do not know how to use the Appearance/Widgets editing page in the Dashboard. Clicking “Links” opens a first option: Select link category – All links/Climate Change/Manilla NSW. What is the reason I should select “All links”? What will it do for me? Am I stuck with the title “All links” or can I change it?
The second option I do understand: “Sort by”. I know I want to sort by Link rating so I can determine myself which link is at the top of the list.
The options that can be checked:
Show link image. What benefit would there be? How could an image fit on the sidebar?
Show link name. Yes.
Show link description. Yes; I don’t want the reader to have to mouse over to see what I am getting at.
Show link rating. No; I rate them only to put them in a logical order.
Visibility. I cannot fathom this.
But most of the decisions about blogroll items are not on this editing page at all. They are on the Dashboard page called “Links”. Is the term “Blogroll” the same as the term “Links”?
On the “Links” page there is a column called “Categories”. First, a quick question: can a link have more than one category?
I thought that the list of Categories for links and my list of Categories for posts were independent, but I found they are not. In my effort to try to get the word “Links” to appear on the blogroll widget, I amended my sub-heading for the link category “Manilla NSW” to “Manilla NSW – Links”. That changed the name of the posts category “Manilla NSW” in the menu banner in the same way – which is nonsense.
Can you explain to me how link categories and post categories are intended to be organised?
In the Dashboard there is a page “Link categories”. It lists the category “blogroll”. How can I include that in my blog?Option (2), the menu item “Links”:
This seems to be controlled in the Dashboard item Appearance/Menus/Edit menus/Links
I cannot make head nor tail of this item. I have succeeded only in attaching one link item to it, and that is not displayed.
As you can see I am having a lot of trouble with my “blogroll” or “links”.The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi Surly, I think option 1 is your best bet.
The title of the sidebar widget is controlled by title of link category that’s being displayed, so if you wanted it to show “Blogroll” you would have to move all of the links to the Blogroll category, rather than Climate Change or Manilla NSW.
If you did that, though, then they would all appear in a single list, rather than being separated into two lists. A potential workaround would be to name the categories “Blogroll: Climate Change” and “Blogroll: Manilla NSW”.
http://en.support.wordpress.com/widgets/links-widget/
The “all links” widget option will group all of the links into a single list, rather than having them be grouped by their category.If you use display an image with links, it would be a small thumbnail, so that it would fit within the sidebar.
The term “blogroll” is synonymous with “links”. The default link category is named “blogroll”, but most places will use the term “links” to refer to the generic concept.
Link categories and post categories are independent from each other. I’m not sure exactly what went wrong when you renamed the link category, but it looks like it’s back to normal now. If you still see the problem happening, though, let me know and we can investigate further.
The blogroll category is just another category, the same as Climate Change and Manilla NSW, just with a different name. It isn’t being displayed because there aren’t currently any links assigned to it.
More details at about the Links widget and its options are available at http://en.support.wordpress.com/widgets/links-widget/. Don’t be afraid to experiment with the different options; you won’t break anything and you can always change them back to the way they were before.
If you decide that you want more control over how everything is displayed, you could use a Text widget and manually add the links with HTML. That’s not as convenient as the Links widget, but it would let you create your own headings, sub-headings, etc.
More information about that is available in these articles:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/widgets/text-widget/
http://en.support.wordpress.com/links/text-widget-links/I hope that helped. Please let me know if you have any questions, or if there’s anything else I can do.
Ian
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