A look inside Google AdSense and blogging as a whole.

Sunday, February 3, 2008

Anatomy of a Blog

Title
Titles are pretty self-explanatory. As with any project name, your blog's title should be easy to remember, catchy, easy to spell, and distinctive. My favorite blog title of all time is "Insolvent Republic of Blogistan" (http://slotman.blogspot.com/). A good, distinctive title helps people find your blog easily on Google if they lose the address (so think twice before naming your blog after the English rock band "The The").

Subtitle
A subtitle is an opportunity to further explain the raison d'etre of your blog or to indulge in a bit of wit. Here are some examples: Kottke.org (http://www.kottke.org/)"Home of Fine Hypertext Products"Electrolite (http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/)"Growing Luminous by Eating Light"Scripting News (http://www.scripting.com/)"It's a weblog about scripting and stuff like that"While not obligatory, subtitles are a widely used convention in blogging.

Suggest Link
Blogging is a collaboration between readers and writers. As people become familiar with your blog, they may stumble upon interesting material that they think might interest you. A suggest link gives your readers an easy way to send suggestions. Some advice on handling suggestions:

You don't need to follow every suggestion you get — it's your blog.
You don't need to explain why you're not following any given suggestion — it's your blog.
If someone pesters you about your rejection of his suggestion, try a response like "Sorry, it just didn't tickle my bloggerbone," which is, of course, another way of saying, "It's my blog."
Be sure to attribute suggested links that you include in your blog.
We used to thank every person who sent in a suggestion, but we get lots and lots of suggestions on Boing Boing (over 30 suggestions per day), and it became impractical.Your suggestion link can be a simple mailto link that sends you a message by email. On Boing Boing, we use a form with a script that my pal Chris Smith wrote and hosts for us. You could use a script like Formmail from http://nms-cgi.sourceforge.net/.
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