Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
II
caution
There are programs that search the Web looking for email addresses so they can be added to mailing lists. The
mailing lists are used to send spam emails advertising all sorts of things—some legal, some not; a few worth-
while, most not. Most of this junk can be blocked by your email system's spam filter, but to put the robots off
the track, consider not including your email address in simple, machine-readable form. Adding some indirection
to your email address, such as writing “budsmith (at symbol) gmail (dot) com” is usually enough to fool
machines without making things too difficult for humans.
Also be aware that people might be able to contact you by using information in your blog to search
for, and find, your email address, phone number, employment, or other information online. One of us
(Smith) recently found a coauthor for a book this way. If “the truth is out there” anyway, it will
appear gracious of you to provide contact information (at least an email address) in a handier form
for your blog visitors.
Top Posts and Widgetalia
Widgets are written to help provide information and resources that your site visitors are likely to
want. Some of the top widgets feed back into your blog with information such as highest-ranked
posts (see Chapter 3, “Creating Your Blog's Look,” for details).
You can provide this information in more managed forms that are easier to use and with more sup-
porting information in a static web page on your site. Widgets, for example, are mechanical; a wid-
get can only show your top posts by number of visitors and in a machine-specified order, such as by
popularity.
It might be, though, that some of your most popular posts tell a story if you put them in the right
order, and that a few key posts aren't among your most popular. By creating a static web page
called “Key Posts” or something similar, you can meet your user's needs—to understand your blog
better and get pointers to the most important posts—better than a widget can.
Other widgets are also good indicators of possible topics for static web pages as well:
•
Archives
—Your Archives widget can get quite tall after half a year or so; a static web page
might be a better approach.
•
Authors
—You can combine author information with links to top posts and all posts by a given
author.
•
Key Comments
—You can highlight interesting comments, encouraging more comments from
people hoping to make the list on your static web page.
•
Links/Blogroll
—With a static page, you can provide contextual information as to why a site is
valuable for visitors to your blog.
This is only a beginning. Static web pages allow you to mix and match information; you can put
information about a blog author, links to their key posts, and links to all of their posts together, just
for one example.
