Blogger: How to Get Categories and How To Upload YouTube Videos

This is a followup on my previous post about how Blogger and IE were screwing up my blog. I am almost html-illiterate and hence I am really averse to changing my status-quo from Blogspot to some new html stuff.

While I was changing templates, I stumbled across a few sites that talked about blogger enhancements/hacks. This site provides the script for creating a category list for blogger (apparently categorization in blogger is not possible directly like Wordpress). If you look at the right sidebar of my blog, there is a list under the title “Categories”. This list was created using the above script. The script makes use of blogger’s search and works and looks pretty cool. Although not perfect, it is better than having no categories at all. More blogger enchancements can be found here including changing background color, converting to three column layout, etc.

On a separate note, after my recent posting of a YouTube video starring Stewie and Brian from the Family Guy, someone asked me how to upload YouTube vidoes in your posts. There are two ways of doing this:

Method 1
First you need to register for YouTube which is pretty straightforward. Then, when you click on a move clip, below the movie clip you will see this box:Click on the “Blog Video” link and enter your blogger login and password (not YouTube password). YouTube will then add your blog. Once a blog has been added, everytime you click on “Blog Video” this box will appear:And now it’s as simple as the box says. Just put in the title and your text and click “Post to Blog” and you are done in no time !

Method 2
Do this, if you dont want to register your blog. When you play the video clip, on the right side of the clip you will see this box:
Copy the content of the field marked “Embed” and paste it in your editing window to insert the video. At times, when you publish the post, blogger will give you a error warning. If this happens, most likely you havent copied the embed script properly.