On 8/9/08 6:11 AM, micki wrote:
I am having an interesting chat with my web-technie
friends at the moment: which is better - a blog or a
website?
A blog is for "what I am doing" posts, where the most-recent
entry is all most readers are interested in. For example,
"Shoulder-Bag Diary" in
http://roughsewing.home.comcast.net/RUFFTEXT/ROUGH023.TXT
would have made a good blog, but it's an execrable component
of a web site.
Unfortunately, I didn't realize that until I was well into
writing it -- and I don't have a needlework blog anyway.
(I have a fandom blog at
<http://laetitia-apis.livejournal.com/>, and a political
blog at <http://joybeeson.livejournal.com/>. I haven't
posted to either in ages. The fandom blog serves mostly to
give me access to friend-locked entries in other Live
Journal blogs. The political blog was created as a place to
post an un-edited copy of a letter to the local paper, and I
have felt the urge to post a rant to it once or twice.)
A couple of blogs I follow:
"What is LKY doing?" <http://www.livejournal.com/users/lky/>
-- LKY has a small circle of friends who care that she has
gone on vacation and want to see photographs of her standing
in front of landmarks. Comments are few and tend to "Yay!"
and "Have fun!"
"More Words, Deeper Hole"
<http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll/> -- James
has a way of writing that makes the most trivial events
fascinating, and he tends to have experiences that are
interesting in themselves. His six cats also have unusual
experiences.
He is also a professional book reviewer, and attracts
readers who share his literary tastes. There are often long
and readable conversations in the comments.
----------
A web site is for material that people will read by topic,
rather than by date. Keeping it fresh isn't as important as
with a blog, because people will come back to read different
parts of it.
A commercial website needs a shopping cart, arm-waving ads,
and the like, and if your format *is* your content, you need
a bastard Graphics/HTML page-writing system, but for
everyone else, I STRONGLY recommend plain old hypertext for
your web pages. Let the reader choose font, text size, line
width, and everything else that depends more on his monitor
and the state of his eyes than on what you are trying to say.
Real hypertext is just plain text with links. The easiest
way to write it is by hand. All you desperately need to
know is that [p] marks a paragraph break (this is
confusingly similar to a [p][/p] code used in the latest
HypergraphicsignoretheText Markup Languages) and that there
are six levels of headers. You put [h1] before the most
important header and [/h1] after it, and so forth through
headers [h2] through [h6].
(Please see angle brackets everywhere I used square
brackets: HTML codes in a plain-text document make some
mail reading programs go bananas.)
If it's going to be *hyper*text, you also need to put in
links, but it's easy to copy a link that works and edit it
to point where you want it to point.
There's a fine point to making a link that displays a
graphics file in among your text: you should specify the
height and width of the picture, so that a browser doesn't
have to wait until the entire picture is downloaded before
it can display the text that comes after it.
It is extremely offensive to use the height/width attributes
to make a picture smaller, because you force the reader to
download a whole bunch of resolution, and then don't let him
look at it. There are enough Web designers who are ignorant
of this point that it's always worth your while to
right-click on a picture that doesn't show as much detail as
you would like, and choose "view image" from the menu.
Another point worth remembering: HTML readers display
carriage returns as spaces, and ignore all surplus spaces.
This is to make it easy to arrange the source code in a
readable manner. Making the source code plain and readable
not only makes it much easier to edit, it serves as a
back-up mode when a browser fails to display properly.
I like to arrange my source code in two columns, with the
text in the right column and the tags confined to the left
column as much as possible. This makes it easy to read the
text straight down, ignoring the mark-up codes. Hanging
indentation makes this format almost automatic.
----
Ah, yes, one more thing you have to learn: how to FTP your
files to the server. I got a techie friend to select a
suitable program (WS-FTP, in my case), so all I have to do
is to open the program, select the remote server from a
drop-down list, select the file or files that I want to
copy, and click an arrow that points at the directory where
I want the copy to appear.
--
Joy Beeson
http://joybeeson.home.comcast.net/
http://roughsewing.home.comcast.net/
http://n3f.home.comcast.net/ -- Writers' Exchange
west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A.
Where I actually needed a shawl to sit outside at sunset!
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