Greetings!

It's been an absolutely brutal summer here in Arkansas this year. They're usually ugly but this redefines ugly. Glad we're moving past the midpoint is all I can say. Trust yours has been better.

We've made an addition to your article Advanced Post Settings feature which relates to your article archive. You are now able to post an article under categories that you define.

Published Article Archive Options

Until now, you had two ways to sort your articles as to how they are presented in your blog archive:

1) Your newest post is at the top of the archive listing (the default) or

2) You can label and manually order the articles under the Article Labels & Advanced UI link located at the bottom of your published articles page. In case you don't know where this is, go to your articles link in your menu, click to published articles and scroll to bottom of page. There you will find a grey cog labeled as noted above.

Check out graphic to the right. After you click on this link, follow the instructions to complete the tasks.

Categories Archive Option

The new categories option allows you to sort your articles into one or more categories that you have defined in the article's Advanced Post Settings function. Within Silvrback, the feature functions the same as the article tags feature.

While it is not uncommon for an article to have multiple tags associated with it (I've seen upwards of a dozen, even more), it is not envisioned that one would do so with categories. Further, tagging is typically associated with external search in mind and specific tags used elsewhere in online media, such as Twitter or Facebook. Categories are viewed here as a more modest internal organizing tool.

Let's run quickly through the steps in using categories.

Open an article, click the Advanced Post Settings grey cog icon, then Add archive categories link. This will open into a screen that allows you to create and remove category labels.

Once you've created the categories, then with each article you can simply click on the categories under which you want a particular article to display.

Be sure to save the selection.

To categorize existing articles, you must open each one, select categories, save and move onto the next.

To delete categories from the list, click first on the category label you want to delete, click the delete link and then save. When you click the delete link, the selected category is highlighted in red with strikethrough.

If you make a mistake in your selection or wish to keep the selection, you can either save and re-enter the category via create or uncheck the box and save or exit before saving the selection. Simple.

Here's how this will display under the Archive Categories link when a reader chooses this option. Categories will appear in blue in alphabetical order. No way around this, so create your categories with this in mind, if that matters to you. Note the graphic to the right.

When to Use Categories

Categories are handy for sorting quite different content and thus making it easy for the reader to focus on content of interest. If you use your blog to write about both professional and personal topics, then this would be a way to sort them for these two groups of readers. You do have the option to include an article in multiple categories.

My personal blog has been organized around a couple of categories if you wish to see it used.

Delete Option for Tags

As you probably know, the feature to create tags for your articles has been available for some time now but the ability to delete them has not. We expect to have this added to the tagging feature soon.

That's all for now.

Kermit