blog-description-format

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Blog description format (background research)

Discussion Participants

Editors

Authors

Contributors

Purpose

A microformat to describe the contents of a (we)blog. It provides a specific set of information to categorize a (we)blog. Enables easier search for humans and efficient collection of information by machines.

Here are some of examples for information that might be provided:

  • Details about the blog
  • Blog name (e.g: "John Doe's Blog")
    • Blog URI (e.g: http://example.org/ )
    • Lanuage used for the blog, read-able by machines (e.g: "en-US" or "de")
    • Topics covered by the blog
    • A short description
    • Available feeds (RSS, Atom, etc.)
    • A small logo image
  • Details about the author(s)
    • Name (e.g: "John Doe")
    • Organisation
    • Contact details
    • Geographical Location

Examples

Add real world examples here

Existing practice

Entry Wrappers

<div class="entry"></div>

The entry wrapper format has widespread usage, but seems to show up in slightly different contexts.

Some blogs (ala Wordpress) use the entry div as a wrapper to the actual post body, and wrap the whole thing in an additional div:

<div class="post">
    <div class="entry">
    </div>
</div>

A vast number of sites, including many blogs contain the main page content within a id="content" div:

<div id="content"></div>



Metadata

Wordpress uses class="postmetadata" to contain meta information, date, others use their own syntax - class="topics", class="description".

Basic Elements

Titles are usually denoted with an H2 or H3 heading. Use of class="title" seems rare, but some sites do use this explicit markup.

class="summary" is used to denote an item summary, usually in a paragraph element.

Permalinks

rel="bookmark" and rel="permalink" are both used in various places to denote a permalink to the specified entry.


Blog description

How do blogs include information about themself?

Feeds

Most blogging tools and services provide information about available feeds in <link> elements.

Example: (random blog from LiveJournal.com)

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/shalom9121/data/rss" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom" href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/shalom9121/data/atom" />

Author information

How do blogs include information about the author?

It seems to be common on blogger.com to include "About me" in the sidebar (see http://www.blogger.com/redirect/next_blog.pyra?navBar=true for a random blog)

See also