How do you go about blogging?

[lucky]

I'm wanting to setup a blog on my site, but there seems to be a few ways people go about this. I see people make single page blogs where everything sort of flows in a feed, then I see blogs where there's an index page then individual pages for each entry.

I'm not sure which one I want for myself. I'm leaning towards the index page kind, or maybe a single page blog where titles extend into entries on click so it's less crowded.

What do you think? What do you prefer? Why?

[BlazingCobaltX]

The only reason I figured out what I wanted is because I tried various things. Right now I don't have anything called a blog on my website-- my walls of text are now split between the journal (literally just writing about my past few weeks) and the 'typewriter' (self-contained pieces about whatever topic). The latter can be called a blog but it felt better for me not to call it that way. The word 'blog' felt too restrictive for what I wanted to post.

I say don't be afraid to try something and change it later when you find something else that works better. 

[Skykristal]

Do you write or plan to write a lot and cover different topics? Then the index/separate page setup is best if you ask me. I am using this concept myself especially because I love to yap about all sorts of things in detail, add images and more. At the top menu I got a dream diary which I actually treat as a one post/page feed because there's just one topic, little entries and pretty much only text. Simple.

From the reader perspective I also prefer the index method, for actual blogs at least. Its far more organized, less endless scroll and lets you jump to a topic you actually wanna read as well. The other format is better for quick postings, diaries or similar concepts.

[Dan Q]

I've been using a (paginated) endless feed since about 1998. Except since about 2012 on the homepage which just shows titles, thumbnails, and summaries. But I'm sick of it and I'm gonna pivot to (paginated) lists of titles, thumbnails, and summaries. I've got way too much content nowadays for this "traditional blog" approach to work for me any more!

Of course, I publish an RSS feed with full content, so people get the option.

[Adam]

I like clean and simple when I'm trying to read.

I have a menu on the side with links for categories and tags, and the main portion of the screen shows a feed of recent posts. The feed only shows the titles and first couple lines of each post with a "read more" button. My thought it that allows someone to quickly scan and see if there's anything they're interested in with minimal scrolling. This is particularly important on mobile devices, since the menu moves to the bottom on small screens. I hate having to scroll forever to reach the bottom of a site.

Like DanQ, I also have an RSS feed as an option. It's my preferred way to follow a blog that I'm actually interested in (like Dan's) and I think RSS is especially important for smaller blogs.
Without an RSS feed, if I stumble onto "Lucky's Cool Blog", I'll read a little and maybe even bookmark it, but then I'll inevitably forget to return and miss out on whatever gets posted in the future. With an RSS feed, however, I can add it to me reader today and follow along for whatever the future holds!   

[AY38910]

I personally just shove text files into a dir and link that dir on the index page. Dates are shown in the filenames.

[boreal_cryptid]

usually, i write to my thoughts.page, and then archive the HTML files to my website from time to time.
if i have any long texts there, then i make journal pages out of them. either just page sections or HTML files, it depends on the text, lolz.
or, i write in my offline markdown diary and use a markdown-to-HTML converter.

[dogbrain]

i’m familiar with manual ways of integrating blogs to static sites that involve writing/pasting entries directly in your html file. in fact, in the early days of my site i tried doing just that! it works perfectly fine for some people, but as i wrote more and more, things got meeeeessyyyy and so i eventually switched to hosting my blog on Dreamwidth. every blog has its own built-in RSS feed which makes it very easy to plug into a reader and have it do most of the work for you.

i’ve come to love using Dreamwidth for bloghosting reasons! i even wrote a tutorial explaining how to use it for that 

[sunnyp4rk]

I push new entries to the main page, and then add a "next" button at the bottom (which leads to an archives upload of the previous entry). I always upload entries to the archives page so then its easy to find the old ones. It's all done manually, no scripts used.

[lucky]

Really interesting feedback everyone!! I'm very indecisive so I still haven't figured out exactly what I'm going to do, but I think I'm getting closer! I'm going to experiment a bit with designing pages and workshop it until I find something I'm happy with. Thanks!

[Dan Q]

It's all done manually, no scripts used.

I started manually, but I'm glad I didn't continue that way because it makes it harder to change your mind later. E.g. as @lucky observed, there's a choice between the traditional "list of post full content" approach and the more-modern-feeling "list of links to full content" approach.

I chose the former, but now - nearly 6,000 blog posts later - I'm planning to change to the latter. I can't begin to imagine how hard that would be if all of my content were manually managed! Using a static site generator (or a CMS) means you can separate "content" from "appearance" and change them independently of one another.

Nobody has to do it that way. Managing everything manually is absolutely an option. But I'm glad that I took the opportunity to separate my content from my presentation within my first few years of blogging: it'd be an insurmountable challenge to do it today!

[mini]

+1 for static site generators, they can make it harder to do super silly and bespoke stuff at times but they really streamline the process of having a blog. You get minifying, automatic tags, translations, ease of changing themes, et cetera and also make your blog fairly easy to migrate to any other technology since you are just writing markdown files :3

I use Hugo and I'd definitely recommend it -although most pre-made themes are boring as heck so I'm looking into making a silly one myself-