Blogging 103: Getting Around rogueclassicism

Most blogs, including rogueclassicism, are made up from fairly standard elements. After the title bar, there is usually a large section which is full of ‘ content’ . This content is published in such a way that the most recent posts are at the beginning and as you work your way down the page, posts are older and older. The number of days and/or entries on a particular page is set by the editor. For rogueclassicism, there are two days presented on any given day (yesterday and today). Originally it was three, but it turned out to be rather unwieldy (I wish other blog owners would take into account the size of their pages! Some of us are still on – gulp – dialup). Two days are the minimum, I feel, since I usually do an update in the a.m. and the p.m., so folks who only read rogueclassicism in the a.m. won’t miss out on what was posted later. I’ve made it easy (I hope) to quickly find the beginning of a new day by preceding each ‘date stamp’ with that little Dover Pericles icon.

Speaking of icons, you have probably noticed a couple of other icons on the rogueclassicism page which might seem mysterious to the uninitiated. At the end of each post you will find:

This is the link to the so-called ‘permalink’. A permalink is the url (web address) of that individual item. Because blogs can change so frequently, if you wanted to send a link to the blog itself to someone for them to find a particular entry, it might have disappeared by the time you get to it (this is one of the problems with blog entries that turn up in search engines, by the way). So instead, the idea is that you send the link to the individual item which, in theory, will work. It should be noted that some blogs do not have permalinks or simply have a text hyperlink to same.

This is (hopefully obviously) an email link. On many blogs, as mentioned in the Blogging 101, there is a facility for commenting. Clicking on the ‘ comment’ link brings up a form by which someone can write directly to the blog (even if they don’t own it). For obvious reasons, I have disabled this feature in rogueclassicism, but have made an email link available. Clicking on this icon will allow you to send me email if you have something to say about anything I’ve put in the blog. If I’d like to post your comment, I’ll ask permission first; if you just send me additional links or whatever, if I decide to use them I’ll thank you within the blog but won’t quote your missive directly.

If you have your screen resolution set high enough, down the right hand side of this page you’ll see another common feature of blogs – the sidebar. I have rogueclassicism set up so it looks best on newer monitors, with a resolution of 1024 by whatever it is. If you have your resolution set differently, you may have to scroll to the right to see the sidebar. In some cases, this sidebar might actually get bumped to the bottom.

Whatever the case, the sidebar has a couple of interesting features. One is that little calendar thing, which allows you to browse the archives. Most blogs, including rogueclassicism, have some sort of archiving facility for all the posts. Days on which the blog was updated is usually highlighted in some way. Click on the day and you’ll get the post(s) for that day. Since rogueclassicism is updated on a daily basis, every day should be highlighted.

Also on the sidebar you will find the traditional ‘list of links’. Most other blogs use this space to provide links to other blogs which that particular blog editor finds interesting and/or reads on a regular basis. I’ve done the same thing, but have broken the list down into categories to provide a bit more narrow focus on subject matter (I’ll be writing about some of these blogs and what you can expect from them in a later post). Some blogs, including rogueclassicism, also provide links to appropriate websites. The links for rogueclassicism, however, all point to things created by me under the ‘atrium-media’ umbrella. Much of that site is under construction, but the existence of this blog will hasten its ‘completion’, I suspect (can a website ever be said to be complete?).

Next: other blogs of interest