blog-post-formats

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Current Blog Formats

There is a need for developing standard classes for blog posts (i.e. a microformat!).

This page serves to document the current list of individual blog post schemas, formats, and efforts as background for the design of a simple blog post MicroFormat.

Discussion Participants

Editor

Authors

Interested Folks

Tools

Drupal

WordPress

Blogger

MovableType

MovableType is a perl-based blogging platform. Note that the MT is old and widely deployed and there are very many different variants on the templates in the wild.

The standard template for the weblog's main page (the "main index") has the following structure:

<body>
 <div class="content">
 <h2>DATE HEADER</h2>
 <h3 id="a####">POST TITLE</h3>
 POST CONTENT
 [ OPTIONAL LINK TO MORE POST CONTENT ]
 <p class="posted">Posted by AUTHOR at <a href="POST URI">POST DATE</a>
 </div>
</div>

The [individual entry archive] template looks like this:

<div class="content">
 <p align="right">
  <h2>POST DATE</h2>
 </p>
 <h3>POST TITLE</h3>
 POST CONTENT
 <div id="more">
  MORE POST CONTENT (optional)
 </div>
 <p class="posted">Posted by AUTHOR at DATE</p>
</div>

Key Elements

  • "content" can enclose an individual entry or all entries, depending on the context
  • "h2" encloses the post date (literally: the time is not included)
  • "h3" encloses the title
  • there is no standard enclosure for all the content
  • there is no clear identification of "here's all the entries"
  • there is no clear identification of the post's author
  • the permalink is not necessarily on the page anywhere

TypePad

Typepad is a MovableType hosting service. It provides a list of default templates and [ "template modules"] from which users can construct or modify their own templates. Looking at several Typepad blogs, most or all of them following the nomenclature and struct defined by these templates.

The individual entry looks something like this:

<h2 class="date-header">the date of the posting (optional)</h2>

<div class="entry" id="entry-#####">
  <h3 class="entry-header">POST TITLE</h3>
 <div class="entry-content">
  <div class="entry-body">
    POST CONTENT
  </div>
   <a id="more"></a>
   <div class="entry-more">
     MORE POST CONTENT
   </div>
 </div>
 <p class="entry-footer">
   POST FOOTER
 </p>
</div>

All the entries (on the main page) are inclosed in this structure:

<body class="layout-two-column-right">
 <div id="container">
  <div id="container-inner" class="pkg">
   <div id="pagebody">
    <div id="pagebody-inner" class="pkg">
     <div id="alpha">
      <div id="alpha-inner" class="pkg">
        INDIVIDUAL ENTRY
      </div>
     </div>
    </div>
   </div>
  </div>
 </div>
</body>

I cannot seem to track down in the templates where the POST FOOTER is defined. However, we can see the results from a sample blog:

<span class="post-footers">Posted by AUTHOR_NAME in CATEGORY</span> 
<span class="separator">|</span> 
<a class="permalink" href="ENTRY_URI">Permalink</a>
| <a href="COMMENT_URI">Comments (2)</a>
| <a href="TRACKBACKS_URI">TrackBack (0)</a>

Key Elements

  • "entry" encloses all elements within an entry
  • "entry-content" contains all the entry text, plus additional text saying "here's more"
  • "entry-header" contains the title of the post
  • "permalink" contains the post's URI
  • there is no clear identification of "here's all the entries"
  • there is no clear identification of the post's author

Examples from the wild