Pagination (beyond << previous and next >>)

[EJelome]

Hi guys, it's me again, I'm almost done with my blog (somewhat complex---since I try to imitate some of WordPress useful features), everything is going well for now except the tags where I just made a glossary of terms for it, so I can still use tags.

There's however, 1 thing that I need help on doing, it's in the subject title: Pagination.

Is there a way where I can count the number of posts for the current category? << Previous and Next >> are fair enough, but not that great. I find pagination like << Previous 1 2 3 ... Next >> to be more efficient and user-friendly, since the user can skip  newer posts and proceed on the farthest ones. It's also SEO-friendly since crawlers can access more posts---better ranking in SERPs.

Any idea on this? I tried counting prev_link and next_link but seems to only contain the path of the current page number (e.g., /blog/category/page/2/).

Kind regards,
EJelome