Wednesday 30 May 2012

Tech Tip: Pages vs Posts

One of the first things you need to learn as a blogger is the difference between Pages and Posts.

Posts are the life and soul of your blog - the new material you post to it, usually date and time-stamped, like diary entries. When you log into your blog dashboard you are usually prompted to 'create a new post.' Over time, your posts build up into a library of stuff, which is stored in date order. When someone subscribes to your blog, they generally subscribe to your posts.

This is a typical heading to a blog post, with the date stamp. (From designer David Airey's site)

When you create a post, put it into a category if you can. Categories act as repositories for related posts, and make it easy for people to find themed material on your site, rather like in a real library. (Blogger.com doesn't have Categories as such, but it uses 'Labels' to categorise posts. More about this in another blog post!)


A Page on a blog is static, that is, it is not date-stamped, it stays in place and doesn't appear in your blog archive. An example of a Page would be your 'About' page. Use pages for information or other 'timeless' material. Usually your Pages appear on a menu that's separate from the blog entries.

On the left is the sidebar menu on www.davidairey.com. Designer David has created Pages with the headings 'Hire me', 'My portfolio', 'About me' and 'A few good books'.

Below this menu is a list of categories (which he has called 'Blog Topics') under which you will find all his blog posts.

With some blog software it is possible to make the homepage of your blog a static page, instead of the usual post. This means visitors to the homepage always see the homepage, and to access the blog posts they need to click through. This can be useful is your blog is also your main website/business.

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