I’m torn between balancing the cohesiveness of having all of my blogs on one site with the desire to have each subblog have a unique visual appearance. I’ve already hacked Mystique to pull up the corresponding tagline and default icon for each category, but I haven’t gone much farther than that.

Now I’m looking at the sidebar and wondering if it’s worth it to have that change as well.

Being able to filter out the blogrolls and the categories down to the relevant content would be a real help. Especially since Unquiet Bones and Custom-Models.com have insane category lists (something I’m working on trimming down).

But this filtering would only take place on the Category pages, since the index, tags, and archive pages will all show a combination of posts.

To filter out the categories listed in the drop-down, I’m planning on using this either in a new sidebar or in a bit of if/elseif code in a widget:

$category = get_the_category();
$categoryID = $category[0]->cat_ID
< ? php wp_dropdown_categories('show_count=1&child_of='.$categoryID.'&hierarchical=1'); ? >

But a lot of what I like about the multi-blog setup is that there is cross-contamination of the categories. Who knows how many people will come by for the original fiction and end up browsing model horses, or pop in for some WordPress/PHP coding and stay for the dual-boxing… but I’m pretty sure the number is more than zero.

So, maybe keeping a list of all the current posts and the icons in the header is enough. I’ll have to keep an eye on the traffic and see how things work out!