Anatomy of a Post - Title

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.

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/.

Welcome to Blogging World

A blog is a web page that contains brief, discrete hunks of information called posts. These posts are arranged in reverse-chronological order (the most recent posts come first). Each post is uniquely identified by an anchor tag, and it is marked with a permanent link that can be referred to by others who wish to link to it.

That's what a blog is, but not what it's for. A blog is a means of communication, and there are many different types of messages carried by blogs. Some are nothing but pointers to other web sites, while others run long essays; some are personal diaries, others feature technology; some are edited by one person, others by teams.

This chapter is an introduction to the world of blogging. You'll learn key terms such as blog and syndication, see the different types of blog, analyze the ingredients of a blog, and compare and contrast the different ways you can run your own blog. After reading this chapter, you can make an intelligent decision on which blogging system to use and will know which of the later technology-specific chapters are for you.

There are hundreds of thousands of blogs on the Internet, and new blogs are created every day. Originally, they were known as weblogs, a term coined by Jorn Barger. The word implies that it might be a record of where some editor has been that day and what she has seen along the way. Now they're blogs (as in "we blog"), a term coined in jest by Peter Merholz (http://www.peterme.com/), and contain everything from political commentary to private journals.
The word blog is also a verb meaning to maintain a blog ("Yah, I blog from time to time.") or to post something to a blog ("Oh, that is so cool, I'm gonna blog it as soon as I get home."). Most people use software to automate the maintenance of their blogs, rather than edit the raw HTML themselves.

Prelude

Blogging has exploded. Every day 1,500-3,000 new bloggers join the Internet. That's a staggering number of new voices, new opinions, and new experiences. You can join these bloggers — all it takes is some software and something to say. We've written this book to help you quickly get up and running with the software.
There are many different choices for blogging software, with names running the gamut from the obvious (Blogger) to the literary (Movable Type) to the bizarre (Blosxom). Everyone who blogs has an opinion about the software they use and often about software they don't use. This book tries to take a balanced look at some representative blogging tools and to show you how to use them to produce a unique blog worthy of your thoughts.
We start by defining a blog and how the various blogging tools differ in features, price, and ease of use. The first chapter will help you find a blogging system. The second chapter surveys some programs that can make posting and maintaining a blog easier, regardless of which tool you choose.The rest of the book is devoted to the tools. For each tool, we show you how to install and configure it, post to and maintain your blog, customize your blog's appearance, syndicate stories with other blogs, and customize and manage your archive of old posts.
Generally, it takes two chapters to explain all the functions of each tool. Some products might have very simple posting maintenance but complex templates, or have simple installation but complex syndication. For this reason, the division of material between the introductory and the advanced chapters isn't consistent from product to product.
Finally, we end with advice from experienced bloggers; what to do, what not to do, and how blogging has changed people. We don't provide much information on the philosophy and sociology of blogging — we don't address the question "Is Blogging Journalism?", nor do we try to define just what a warblogger is. Our main objective is to help you select a blog system and get it up and running as soon as possible.