The blog post is the atomic unit of a blog. Blogs are made of successive postings. Some blogs are updated only once a week, others get updated 30 or more times per day (the record for Boing Boing is 27 posts in one day). Everything about a blog post is optional. There are no rules for blogging. Many weblogs follow a similar format. Some of the salient features of that post follow.
Title
A post's title serves much the same role as a newspaper headline: to sum up the post in a few words that are meant to intrigue the reader and highlight some aspect of the story. A title visually separates your posting from the one above it. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen, in his essay on "Microcontent" (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980906.html), warns headline writers to be aware that headlines are often viewed out of context, on search-engine result pages, in alphabetical listings (he advises leaving off leading "The"s and "A"s for this reason), and as subject-headers for email and titles for web pages.
As you'll see later, titles are also used when blogs are syndicated using a technology called RSS, in which they may appear in a list of hundreds or even thousands of other blog headlines. The point is that your title should be separable from the posting below it — informative even when taken out of context.
