I noticed a little while back you can view Downloads and Gallery indexes as categories rather than in their default images (is this the correct terminology?) view. This can be done by appending "categories/" to the end of the URL.

Question is, how to make the category view the default view?

Is a category view possible within Blogs? I attempted to append "categories/" to the Blogs URL without success.

Ted.

Blogs don't have categories, but you can list individual blogs (the closest analog), or the latest blog entries, on the index page.

There is no option to show categories as the default index page for Downloads I'm afraid. Gallery already lists its categories as the default view when visiting the Gallery (along with other streams of images, which you could remove from the template if you wanted).