Richard Farrar’s Blog

While structured articles may not be appropriate to every blog, the vast majority of blogs will undoubtedly benefit from having a definite article structure, easing readability, improving general reader engagement and even helping you during the writing process.

Writing a blog post or web article is not that dissimilar to writing any other sort of article, and as such many of the same writing principles remain. To communicate your thoughts in cohesive and coherent fashion, and capture the reader’s attention, your articles really need to follow a defined structure. A good article structure will help readability and enable you to get your point across better.

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Once you’ve gone through the initial birth pains and learning curve of setting up your blog, then begins the rewarding phase when you’re no longer learning to blog, but begin blogging to learn.

If you’ve never blogged before, then you’ll have a steep learning curve to go through while you learn the technicalities of blogging, together with the language used by bloggers and the protocols and ethics of the blogging community.

However, once this period is over and you get into your stride with your blog, the learning doesn’t have to cease. At this point, you have a choice. You can continue bumbling along, writing your regular postings on your particular topic using your new found blogging skills, or you can push yourself to learn more about your field of interest, expanding your, and your reader’s horizons in the process.

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RSS feeds allow users to receive a brief description of your latest web article alerting them to your new posting, so why not consider optimising this summary to really entice readers?

RSS feeds are an excellent way of keeping people informed of the latest additions to your website. They do this by displaying a short summary of your web article in the user’s RSS reader as a teaser to your main article. But, rather than leave things to chance, wouldn’t it be better to carefully hand craft the RSS summary to maximise your chances of pulling in the reader?

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In the blogging community, the debate over the use of full or partial RSS feeds seems to rage on with no sign of abating. Elsewhere, the decision seems much more straightforward.

So what is all the fuss about? Well, it’s all about the description field in the RSS feed and whether it should just contain a summary of the article being linked to, or the complete article in its entirety.

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Do desktop blogging clients offer any significant advantages over using the native web based WYSIWYG editors included with most blogging platforms or are they just an extra layer of fluff?

Being relatively new to this blogging malarkey, I hadn’t heard of desktop blogging clients until the other day when I was reading an article by a professional blogger Darren Rowse at ProBlogger on his “blog posting workflow“, in which he made reference to using a desktop blogging client called ecto.

While ecto was originally a Mac only client, there is now also a Windows version, however, it’s not free, and being a bit tight fisted I decided to scour the web to see what else was available for Windows.

After a bit of searching, I came across Windows Live Writer, a free blogging client for Windows from Microsoft. One quick download later and time to experiment…

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