Categories in Blogger

So I want to do categories, but Blogger doesn't support it. Now I'm on the hunt. The article 'Categories in Blogger' by Martin English suggests an interesting hack that really exploits all the free crap Google will give you. He has you:

1. Set up a separate Blogger blog for each category as well as a master Blogger blog.
2. Set up each category blog to automatically email all postings to a Gmail account.
3. Set up the master blog to allow posting via email.
4. Set up a filter in that Gmail account to forward all mail received to the master blog's posting address.

It's kind of cool, but kind of ridiculous. If you want a consistent and customized look and feel, you've got to enter your template on all those blogs. What about permalinks? An entry would have a different permalink depending on whether you were looking at the master blog or the category blog. No posting could be posted in two categories. Then there's the mess of having either two separate comment threads for each posting or not allowing commenting directly from one of the two blogs where each item shows. This is just too messy. There are two other common tricks I've come across:

• Using del.icio.us tags
• Using a Google search

These are both best used with some bookmarklet or Greasemonkey enhancement. Having looked at some examples of using the Google search method, I'm not interested. The results are just too ugly, and even though Google is rock-solid, it makes me nervous having my categories based on a full-text search of the postings. (Just because I mention Java in a posting doesn't mean I want it showing up in my Java category.) The best info on use of del.icio.us to do blog post tagging seems to be on Freshblog. Between "3 ways to use del.icio.us for categories in blogger" and "Tagging with BlogThis," we've got a lot of options. The third method in the first article sounds great, if I were using Firefox most of the time. Alas, I prefer Safari, so Greasemonkey is not for me. (Maybe I'll give Firefox for the Mac another go now that 1.5 is out, but for now I'm sticking to my brushed steel buddy in spite of some of its quirks.) The best option for Safari seems to be the suite of XBlogThis! bookmarklets described in the second article, which apparently originated over at Ken's Meme Deflector. So I try the CategoryTagBlogThis bookmarklet from Freshblog, which sounds like the best thing I'm going to get. It works. I highlight some text on a page, click the bookmarklet, get a little popup where I'm prompted for an author citation and a list of tags. When I submit that, I get the normal Blogger BlogThis! window, but pre-filled with a posting title from the page title of the page I'm blogging, the URL of the page in the link field, and a body that contains the highlighted text as well as links to my del.icio.us links for the tags I entered. This is cool, but optimized for the linkblog, which isn't really the use case for my blog. The key thing it doesn't do is take care of actually creating the del.icio.us link for the new posting, which is a key manual step I want to eliminate. A second bookmarklet that I could click after posting would improve this a bit, but it's still pretty lame. Hopefully Blogger will add category support soon.