I lead double lives. Most of my friends and family know I do “computer stuff”, but have little clue what that actually involves. I want to be able to blog not only about music, triathlon etc. but also about (often deeply technical) computer stuff without causing normal people to run away screaming. So the question is, should I set up two separate blogs, or do it all in one but use some Google Blogger hackery with labels and templates to hide the geek stuff from the default view?

Separate blogs would have been the easiest way by far. But then that would mean ditching the potential niceties of the Blogger label system, which includes a boolean query interface for feed URLs (not yet fully implemented as this example shows). What I really wanted was for the default view from the homepage to hide scary technical stuff, but to also give the reader the options of viewing any of the following:

• just geek stuff
• just non-geek stuff
• just posts with a particular label
• everything

I also wanted to provide RSS or Atom feed links corresponding to these views.

So after poring google for techniques, I found some existing hacks, invented one or two new ones, and combined them together, and (I hope you’ll agree) it works pretty well.

If you want to know the implementation details, see my next post.

Epilogue: In the end I gave up with Blogger and switched to WordPress.

One Response to “Two blogs or not two blogs?”

1. jdebaer says:

   April 22, 2009 at 8:01 pm

   i’d run away screaming from triathlon

   Reply