Some Blogging Tips

[Last updated: 18th July 2005 8:00am PST.
Note: Thanks to everyone who has commented on this. It's clear from the comments that there can never be one single answer, so I'll add the disclaimer that this post reflects what I do. I strongly suggest reading all the comments to get several interesting variations and a lot of background on various items].

We had the second Sun bloggers meeting in Menlo Park yesterday afternoon. About 20-25 people in the room and with about another 7-10 people on the phone. It was hosted by Linda with informal presentations/chats by Claire and Will. Dave was there to give the definitive answer on anything roller related. Jonathan stopped by for quite a while to chat and to answer (and ask) several questions. All very interesting.

So here's my little bit. First of all, if you are a new Sun blogger, you should go to our internal blogging site ("blogs dot sfbay") and click on the "Blogs User Documentation" link near the top of the page. That will take you to the Sun bloggers Wiki. When you get there, click on the "FAQs" link in the "Find Your Answers" section. This should cover most of the common questions that you'll have when getting started.

Some people just want to write and don't want to have to learn HTML. I can understand that. It's hard to do a good job with something, when you are constantly fighting the tools. So if this resembles you, check out:

• Textism. It's web based. You type your text in the top area. There is a simple "markup" language to get to some of the HTML features and you then click the "Text to HTML" button to generate the equivalent HTML. You would then cut & paste that HTML into your roller blog entry.
• Markdown. It's written in Perl and you'd need to download and unpack it. It's similar in functionality to Textism, but several people who have tried both, prefer the simplicity and intuitiveness of Markdown.

Personally I think you need to know a little HTML to make your blog more interesting. I've tried several blogging clients and have always found that there is something that they can't do (or don't do the way I like) and have always reverted back to composing posts "by hand" in a text editor. I hear (from Geoff) that MarsEdit is good. The problem is that I create posts on Solaris (at work) and Windows Xp (at home) as well as Mac OS X (when travelling). I need something that's ubiquitous.

Here's the HTML I use. You really don't need all of this but I'll include it here anyhow. View this in conjunction with a simple HTML primer to get a better overall understanding of what HTML is and the tags described here. Like most languages, there are oodles of different operators and ways of doing things. To get going, you only really need to use a small subset of them.

I'll start with what I consider the essental tags:

• Paragraphs: The <p> tag.
• Line Break: The <br> tag.
• Links: The <a href="url">label</a> tag.
• Making Text Bold: The <b>...</b> tag.
• Underlining Text: The <u>...</u> tag.
• Emphasising Text: The <em>...</em> tag.
• Preformatted Text: The <pre>...</pre> tag.
• Including Code: The <code>...</code> tag.
• Unordered List: The <ul>...</ul> tag in conjunction with the <li>...</li> tag for each item.
• Quoting Text: The <blockquote>...</blockquote> tag.

Here are some other useful tags:

• Striking Through Text: The <del>...</del> tag.
• Headings: The <hn> ...</hn> tag.
• Making Text Italic: The <i>...</i> tag.
• Horizontal Rule: The <hr>...</hr> tag.
• Ordered (Numbered) List: The <ol>...</ol> tag in conjunction with the <li>...</li> tag for each item.

I like to include a small image near the top of most posts, and to do that I used to use:

  <table>
    <tr>
      <td>
        <a href="some link">

        <img src="url for some image" /></a>
      </td>
      <td>
      <p>
      ... first paragraph...
      </td>
    </tr>
  </table>

After discussing this via comments to this post (see there for more details), I changed this to:

    <div id="blogphoto">
    <a href="some link">
    <img src="url for some image" alt="" style="float: left" /></a>
    <p>
    ... first paragraph...
    </div>
    <br clear=all>

    #blogphoto img { 
        margin: 5px; 
    }

For a variety of reasons, I then reverted back to using tables.

If you don't care about the second or subsequent paragraphs wrapping up by the image or how close the text is to the side of that image, (or if you've successfully been able to deal with this directly in your _css file), then the image inclusion code is a lot simpler:

    <a href="some link">
    <img src="url for some image" alt="" style="float: left" /></a>
    <p>
    ... first paragraph...
    <p>
    ... second paragraph...
    <p>
    ... and so on ...

There are lots more HTML tags, but those are really the only ones I use.

When I create a post, I use three web sites extensively:

• Google to research the article and find useful links. I also use Google Images to typically find the small image I include at the top of my entries. More often than not, I'll just use one of thumbnails that Google creates. I try to make sure that I don't use something that is copyrighted though.
• Amazon for all book related links.
• Dictionary.com to check on the spelling of words I'm not sure of. I don't normally spell-check an entry, just checkup on the words I think I might have misspelt. Dictionary.com is nice in that it'll give you a list of possible alternatives, so it's usually very simple to work out the correct spelling.

After I've cut & pasted my blog entry into the "Edit Weblog" roller window, I save it as a draft. Then I'll click on the "New Entry" link at the top to create a second window. I'll then select my new text under the "Recent Drafts" heading on the left side. In the other of those two windows I'll Preview that entry, and I'll review it to make sure it looks okay, make editing changes to the text to fix it up in the other window. One of my pet peeves with the current roller is their is no longer a way to preview the text for the post and to make changes in the same window. An earlier version of roller had this, but that feature has been removed (for some reason) from newer versions.

(Note: you should also validate what you've created, to avoid any possible syntax errors).

There's a lot more you can do with your blog (just check some of the examples at blogs.sun.com, but for people just starting out, knowing how to use the above tags should help you generate very nice posts.

I'm going to treat this as a "living" document for a while, so if you have any suggestions, corrections, additions or changes you think I should make, please let me know.

[Technorati Tag: Blogging]

( Jul 01 2005, 08:47:17 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [13]