wayne on July 10, 2008
In this installment we will take a quick look at the parts of your newly defined blog we created in the prior lesson. If the images are too small to see, try clicking the image or you might want to have another window open of the blog you created, or of the Views on Life blog to help. If you can see the images well enough, I'd say your good to boogie.
Note to new visitors! If you would like to know more about this series or view all available lessons, just follow the appropriate link.
On with the show...
The Blog Homepage
Here we have a snapshot of the blog we just created in the prior lesson. As you will see, I have identified the various parts of the blog. Here is an explanation of each part and what its function is. These are also the names I will use when I refer to these various parts during the rest of the lessons to follow.
The Blogger.com Blog Homepage ('your homepage')
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Blog Archive Area - The blog archive provides your visitors with a few things. Its primary purpose I suppose is to allow one to navigate through your entire collection of posts that you write over time. If a user is interested in something you wrote last May, this component will allow them to find those posts. Quite honestly though, I never use these myself. When I see them on other blogs, I use these to see how long the blogger has been blogging. Remember, most blogs are deserted within 6 months. If I see a blog that has a lengthy archive, it's more likely they will be around even longer, thus I may be more encouraged to supply a comment and become active on their blog. If there are less, then I may not be so inclined to become active. It really depends though...if the posts are good, I may just start screaming for more. My opinion there.
Personally, I don't like them. I find them about as beneficial as the calendar widget you see on some blogs. When is the last time you ever used the calendar widget? Probably never.
NOTE! The little screwdriver and wrench icon allows you, the editor, an easy way to manage the archive component. This is not visible to your non-admin users.
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About Me Area - I think this is pretty straight forward. The image is either an image off your computer or one that exists on the web. Your name is displayed as well as your 'about me' text. The image and the 'View My Complete Profile' when clicked take the user to your personal profile.
NOTE! The little screwdriver and wrench icon allow you, the editor, an easy way to manage the about me component. And yes, I copied this text from item 1 above...
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Post Header - Your post header is displayed for each blog entry you create. When you create a post (or entry as it is sometimes called), the title you supply the post will display here. There is also a date that shows when the post was made visible to the public. When you write a post, there are options you can modify to have the post you are writing display at a particular date and time of your choosing. The default date is the current date and time of when you publish your post, however you can have a post show up at 3:00 AM in the morning or days later. When I do this, I sometimes get the 'what in the world were you doing up until 3:00 AM blogging???'. I'm never up that late, but all my posts here come out at 12AM. I do this for a few reasons. You'll have to ask me why if you want to know though.
Clicking the title will take you to the blog post page where the entire text of the post is displayed and all the comments on the post will be shown. This is also where others are given the opportunity to comment on the post as well. Commenting is coming up shortly...hang in there. Still with me?
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Post Body - This is the main body of text that you have written. You can include pictures, media, embed objects from other sites, make links out of the text that take users to other posts, or other parts of the Internet.
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Post Footer - The post footer will display immediately after each post that is displayed on your homepage. It shows who the author was for this post (as there can be multiple people that work on a single blog, or the one person can have aliases that he or she uses), it shows the time the post was made visible, and how many comments have been made so far.
The pencil icon in the footer provides you, the editor, an easy way to edit the post. No, I didn't copy this text, I wrote it again. :) Clicking the pencil will take you to the edit post screen where you can modify your post if you want to.
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Subscribe Link - Your subscribe link should be prominently displayed on your blog as it is the link you want people to grab and add to their feed readers. I disagree with blogger.com putting it at the bottom, and we'll look to change that in the coming lessons. As well as a more detailed look at what Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is, and why it's important to a blogger.
NOTE! There is a difference between browsers as to how they handle this particular link when you click on it. For instance, in IE6, clicking on it returns the following:
I honestly have no clue why blogger doesn't provide a proper subscription page, but to work around this, I usually right-click on the link and choose Copy Shortcut. This puts the URL for the feed in my systems memory. I will then open my reader and paste the URL into my reader. Mozilla based browsers seem to have support for this link, as I've seen FireFox handle them with a special page for subscribing.
Bottom line here, this link is your
main source of gaining subscribers, so we are going to lift it up the food chain as it were and make sure that people can find it easier.
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Blog Header - Finally, the last portion of our blog is the header. This is where our Title is displayed as well as any description about the blog. We can add an image to the header as well if we so choose.
And that my friends are the parts of the blog homepage. Please note that we can change these parts around to fit whatever look we are going for. Yours may be completely different, or nearly the same. In either case, you definitely have all the elements described above at your disposal.
Blog Comments
Comments are what makes a blog fun, in my opinion. It's usually nice to have someone comment on a post you wrote, unless they come bearing razor sharp teeth. :) When you click the title of the blog post on the blog homepage, you are taken to a page where the entire text of the post is displayed, as well as all the comments made on the post. The comments are displayed in the order that they were given. First in, first displayed. (FIFD...yeah, go ahead and sound that out...you know you want to...)
The First Comment
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Number of Comments - This shows how many comments were made on the current post. Simple.
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Comment Author - Who wrote the comment? In the image above, some joker by the name of GJG wrote this comment. :) If you hover your mouse over the author names that are hyperlinks, they will see in your browser status bar that they usually point back to the commenter's own blog. This is part of what makes blogging work. To help bring more traffic to your site, you need back-links. Back-links? Yes, back-links. Those are links on another site that point to your site. They also show the blog owner that you have a blog and thus, they may come to your blog and leave a comment. Nice huh!
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Comment Text - When GJG left his comment, he not only gave his contact information, but he also had something to say. This is the body of the comment. Thanks for leaving a comment for me
Gary (and
everyone else that did too!), it came in handy as you can tell.
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Comment Date - This is the date and time that the comment was left. You'll notice there is a little trash can next to the date and time. Only an admin of the blog will see this, and it gives you the ability to delete the comment should you want to.
Because this particular post generated a few comments, I could not show the entire list of comments. So I'm skipping ahead here a bit to the last one to show the footer of the comment list.
The Last Comment
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Post a comment - At the very end of the list of comments there is a link labeled 'Post a comment'. That does exactly what you would expect it to do. It provides a way for users to post a comment. The default 'post a comment' form that users will see is to the right.
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Home - This takes you to the blog homepage.
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Subscribe Link - Here it is again, the subscribe link. See above for a more detailed explanation of this link.
Wrapping it all up
As you have seen, there are several 'parts' that comprise a blog. Most of these parts are configurable in one way or another. Some you can choose to hide or display, some have properties that you can set values against. For instance, I can change the Title property by setting a value of 'Wayne's Blog' if I wanted to. I could modify the way the comments box provides for identifying the user supplying a comment.
Knowing the different parts that comprise your blog will help us with discussing these parts by name without a detailed explanation of where they are.
Give Some Feedback on this Lesson
Did you have any questions on any part of this lesson? Leave a comment below or shoot me an email and ask your question. There is no such thing as a stupid question, and as my teachers always said, if you are wondering about it, someone else probably is too. So ask! You have nothing to lose except the lack of knowledge.
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