AboutSelf Guided Tour of Blogs Continued
What you are reading now is a post – an article on my blog. You may be reading this post on my blogsite, Fractals of Change (URL blog.tomevslin.com); you may be reading it in a feedreader like Bloglines or newsgator; or you may even be reading it on one of the “reflection sites” which repost posts from blogs written by other people.
No matter where you are reading this post (unless it has been pirated dishonestly), you’ll see some links at the bottom which look like this:
| Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) | Tag with del.icio.us | Incoming links | Blogroll | Books | Podcasts | Search blog | Subscribe to blog | Email this post
Different blogs produced with different software have different links at the bottom or use different names for the same links. I have been puttering around my blog lately adding some nonstandard links so I have more links than most other bloggers. It frustrated me that these links appeared only when posts were read on my blogsite since many of you see the posts only in feedreaders; so I went back to my roots and spent some nights nerding to make them appear wherever the posts are read.
(note to blogger nerds: This is clearly all about bringing much of the value of the blogsite to feeds. I’ve posted some of the implementation techniques, Typepad version, here. Will post a cleanup of the old hacks plus new ones soon. Also feel free to modify and use any part of this post or my guide to sidebars here with or without attribution to describe your own blog to newbies.)
Here’s what the links are used for:
The sample links above are from a post I made on August 8, 2005. The category I chose for this post was Weblogs. I could have chosen more than one category but I didn’t in this case. If you click on you will go to a view of my blogsite which contains all of my posts in that category. So, when you like a post and want to read more on the same subject, follow this link.
This link contains the URL under which a post will be stored forever and ever (or at least for a long time). Clicking on it will just bring you to a view of the post you just read so that isn’t very useful. The real purpose of Permalink is to be copied so that you can send the URL to someone else or save it somewhere. Windows users right click on it and select Copy Shortcut to get it on the clipboard ready for pasting somewhere else. I’m sorry but I don’t know the Mac equivalent.
If you want to comment on a post or see comments from other people, click here. For technical reasons, the number in parenthesis which is the current comment count only appears in the blogsite version of a post.
Some blogs including mine allow other bloggers to post a trackback when they write something in their blog which refers to a post on the first blogger’s site. How’s that for confusing? I’ll give an example. Fred Wilson blogged on tagging here. When I also blogged on tagging here, I included a trackback to his post. My trackback does not appear anywhere in my blog; it appears on his. It lets readers of his post know where they can find other posts which discuss or refer to his post.
There are two uses for this link. If you click on it, it will show you what other bloggers posted about this post WITH AN EXPLICIT TRACKBACK and give you a chance to link to their posts. In this case, the zero in parenthesis means there were none. If you are a blogger, you are also interested in seeing the Trackback URL which appears when you click here. This URL is something you need if you want to post a trackback on Fractals of Change.
Clicking on this link takes you to a site called del.icio.us where you can tag a post with any words which are meaningful to you. This user tagging serves to purposes: it makes it easier for you to find the post again if you ever want to because you will have assigned it a tag meaningful to you AND it can help other people find this post and, perhaps, judge its usefulness by who or how many people tagged it. I blogged much more detail about tagging here.
Clicking here takes you a page on Technorati which shows you posts which link to this post. “Hey,” you say, “that sounds like trackback. You already did that.” Well, sort of. Trackback can only identify those bloggers who took the trouble to use trackback to identify their link. Technorati searches a lot of blogs to find references whether trackback was used or not. It’s not perfect; I think it only finds about half the references. But it’s still a good way to find more conversation on a subject which interests you.
A blogroll is a list of links to other blogs (I include a few nonblog websites as well) which the blogger looks at regularly and recommends. Click here and you will see my blogroll at the top of the page in the right sidebar. Particularly useful if you’re reading my blog in a feedreader and can’t see the sidebars.
Click here and you’ll see my list of recent and recommended reads in the left sidebar. You can even click on them to order from Amazon (for which I get a small fee).
This is a link to podcasts which I’m in. It is in the right sidebar.
Click here and the Google search box appears in the right sidebar. You can use its familiar keyword search to look for anything I’ve ever posted on Fractals of Change.
You may not want to bother coming to my website every day in order to see whether I’ve posted anything new or whether what I have posted is of any interest to you today. In this case you can subscribe by email or through a feedreader and be alerted whenever there’s a new post. I’ve blogged about feeds here. Click on Subscribe to blog and you’ll see links for subscribing to Fractals of Change and to my podcasts in the left sidebar.
If you think something I blogged may be useful or interesting or annoying to someone else, this link gives you an easy way to send that someone else a link to the post. It simply opens a new message containing the link in your email program (so just use this capability on your own computer). You address this message, change it anyway you want, and send it off.
I hope you do this once in a while.
Now that you are the bottom of this post, you can see all its links right below this sentence.
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