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OK this falls into the category of "if you don't know what it is don't bother." I know what a blog is but I've basically never spent time reading one or noticing how they're set up. And wouldn't you know it, I want to do one. I'm a little confused as to it's set up or layout.
I have two websites with one page blogs each. But now I want to continue the blogging. I figured they are web pages collected under one heading. But now I am thinking maybe that's not the case. IOW I started a blog called The Art of Improvisation" and did my First Post under that. Now with my second post, under the same topic, I added a page and called it 2nd Post. There's a little arrow link that says first post under the heading The Art of Improvisation. All good. I'm getting it, I think. I add a 3rd Post, new page, and it's all confused. I haven't figured out how to do the same and have a series of 1-3 and more posts under that heading. Dragging the pages or put the in order in the Navigator is challenging. The pages are independent, not under the Art of Improv heading, or one is and the 3rd isn't. It's like a shell game.
So then I assumed I have it all wrong. Each addition to the blog should be on the same page, just update and the date will indicate new time. But it doesn't seem to. It still indicates the original date and not a new section or post to the blog.
Does any of this rambling confusion make any sense. The Help sections didn't seem to help.
Henry Robinett
http://www.henryrobinett.com/
http://henryguitar.com/
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I went to the page in your signature and found only one blog with one post, so I'm having a hard time visualizing what is happening and what you want your blog collection to be about. I've done blogs in several places and have recently migrated my iWeb blogs to Sandvox. So here are a couple of characteristics of blogs that Sandvox automatically does for you.
1. There is a blog summary page that shows your posts. In SV it defaults to showing all of each post and I think limits it to 10 posts. When you click on a link in a post, it takes you to the page where the blog text actually lives. The idea of the summary page is to give your readers a glance at what's new in the blog if it is still a living blog. So, you can use the inspector in SV to tailor how this looks to your viewers.
2. Most blogs post in reverse order of creation. This is so that blog readers can look at what's new and subscribers to your blog can follow it in real time. So, you don't want to try to move the pages in your blog around if you are really keeping a blog. You want to enter them in the order that they occur and then SV will show them in reverse order. If you need to back date some things to get them to be in th right order, you will want to actually change the creation date on the blog entry.
3. The one blog post I found on the site in your signature (nice site design btw) is quite long. Nothing wrong with that, but you might want to think about limiting the summary page to show only parts of each post. Then the links can take your readers to the full post if they want to see it.
I do not run a living blog right now, but I have several examples on my recently migrated iWeb site. I changed the order to be normal date order because the blog is no longer living and people aren't going to follow my road trip in real time now. But you can get an idea of how I set up the blog so that people could see the pages from the summary and how they can get to the blog posts. Take a look here: http://tigerxtreme.com/my-trips/mount-r … more-blog/
If you want help setting up the blog page, point us to a page with a couple of entries and tell us what you want to be different about it or what is confusing to you. Blogs can be a lot of fun and I find them a great way to communicate with family and friends when doing things like vacations and such.
Oh, on comments for my blog - ignore them. I wanted to preserve the ones made on my iWeb site, so I brought them over as text in the new blog. They are not comments like you set up in SV. It looks like you figured that part out anyway.
-Karen
http://tigerxtreme.com
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Thats really nice Karen. Thanks for the tips. I clearly don't know blogs or have a clear idea even of what I want.
But the blog in question is at another site: http://henryguitar.com/the-art-of-improvisation/
I haven't yet published the other posts yet.
So the first page is just a short sentence or two that references the actual blog? Is it customary to update, change or otherwise alter blog content?
I just got home from a long Sunday excursion, so I'll check it out further tomorrow. Thanks again!
Henry Robinett
http://www.henryrobinett.com/
http://henryguitar.com/
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I call the "first page" the summary page. I'm not sure what SV calls it. This is the page you gave me in the link above. I read your first post. It's pretty cool. You talk about improvisation and what it means to you and how it is inspiring. You seem to be speaking to a wide audience. Like, I can understand it and I've had limited musical instruction in my life. So, is this the beginning of something you plan to keep going? Are you thinking of adding improvisation tips on a somewhat regular basis so that your viewers can look periodically and see what you've been thinking? The real question I'm asking is... What is the reason for your blog and how do you want people to see it? Then you can figure out more about how to structure it.
I have several types of blogs on my site and several that I subscribe to. On my site there are basically 2 types:
1. Trip Journal - I have several, including the one I linked to in my reply above. The Mt Rushmore one has about 45 posts and each post has something to do with the trip. The posts were made in real time so that each day my friends and family could follow along with my blog / journal. Now someone (including me) can visit my site and read the blog in date order so they can live my trip one day at a time.
2. Projects - the Woodstock blog was a project blog. It is similar to the trip blogs but it's a journal about how a friend and I went through a small town in Northern CA near where we live and photographed a bunch of Peanuts Woodstock statues that were part of the city's art project. Still like a journal though.
One of the blogs I subscribe to is about coffee roasting. I roast my own coffee and the owner of this site posts to his blog whenever he puts a new coffee up for sale on his site. He may also post if he learns something new and cool about roasting or if he suddenly has an important announcement to make about other products he sells. So, his blog purpose is ongoing forever and designed to keep his customers informed.
OK, now for some technical blog stuff.
The summary page is just that. My summary pages usually have a paragraph about the purpose of the blog and what you can find in it. This is text I add BEFORE the First Post post on the actual summary page (collection page). The actual posts are done from the new empty pages you add under the summary page and you never modify your post content on the summary page. You use the inspector to tailor the look of the summary page (see below).
Next, I enter the post on the page for that post. I retitle it with a headline that makes sense for the post. I write as much or as little as I want. Think of it like a newspaper article or an update to your readers. The idea is that once you write a post, you leave it alone. I will sometimes fix broken links that occur when a web site goes away. I will sometimes fix typos. But I basically never change the actual post. Write it and forget it. Your readers will read it and forget it.
When you do the second post, same thing. Click on the summary page in the left frame of SV and then do New> Empty / Text to create the second post. This will automatically make a new post BEFORE the first post because the creation date is NOW, which is later than the first post. Write about a topic and publish it. It will show up at the top and your first post will show up underneath it on the summary page.
Keep going with the posts, making them each be a short story or whatever about new stuff that pertains to the purpose of your blog.
Now for the summary page - you have to decide what you want here. If I were doing the coffee roasting one, I'd limit the number of posts to 5 or 10 on the summary page (this is an option in the object inspector for the posts from the summary page). I'd probably limit it to a few more lines than I allowed on my Rushmore trip so that short posts could be read without clicking on them. In my trip blogs, I opted for the grid layout and cut the text way back because the trip is over and people now want to scan the whole blog and look for what they want to read about.
Does this help you more?
-Karen
http://tigerxtreme.com
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WOW! That extremely helpful. Thanks. I just got up so my mind isn't in full swing yet. But thank you. Yes, the improvisation blog will be added to. I have two new posts to plug in at the moment, whenever I decide on the format, or discover how to do it. I have to wake up and practice, then I'll get back to this. Thank you!
Henry Robinett
http://www.henryrobinett.com/
http://henryguitar.com/
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