Does Your Blog Interface Influence How You Blog?

There are many different ways to write a blog posts. Some people prefer a simple text editor, an offline blogging tool or simply the write post area of your blog software. There are so many tools available that it is a matter of trying to find the right one for your personal posting pattern.

I am still trying to find the perfect writing environment. I often use a no-nonsense simple text editor, or a program such as Dark Room (Windows) or WriteRoom (Mac) that provides me with a full-screen, semi-distraction free writing environment. But because these programs are so basic it means that I will have to manually insert all the links. Am I lazy? What about the oldskool bloggers that manually coded their whole blog?

Blog software spoiled me.

The software makes it feel easier to insert links and markup my blog post. On top of that it checks my spelling and automatically saves while I write. When working on a blog post in a text editor I often find myself switching back to the write area of my blog software because of these features. Blog software obviously supports blogging features that text editors don’t. Blogs are hypertext documents that revolve around links.

Early blogs were often a daily collection of links, such as Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom and Justin Halls’s Links.net. An early blogging service named Pitas made the link the prime object of the interface as it

[…] provided users two simple form boxes: one for a URL and one for the writer’s remarks. Hitting the “post” button generated a link followed by commentary. (Blood, 2004)

By providing users with just two fields, one for the link, and one for commentary, the software shaped the blog post. The link was the main feature of the blog. Rebecca Blood argues in her article on ‘How Blogging Software Reshapes the Online Community‘ that Blogger changed the weblog culture in 1999 with an important interface decision:

Blogger was simpler still, consisting of a single form box field into which the blogger typed whatever they wanted. I sometimes wonder whether the new bloggers knew enough HTML to construct a link. Whether they did or not, Blogger was so simple that many of them began posting linkless entries about whatever came to mind. (Blood, 2004)

Links were no longer a central object of the interface and a different type of blogs were constructed. The blogging interface enable and constrains certain practices. Embedding a YouTube video in WordPress for example can be quite tricky. You need to switch to code mode in order to insert the embed HTML code and not return to visual mode before publishing. Not only does blog software still privilege text it may also influence how (often) you write.

It is worth mentioning that a negative relationship exists between the efforts required to update a blog and the frequency of updating. Simply put, the easier it is for bloggers to post entries to blog, the more likely they will do it. (Dan Li, 2005, p. 28)

See Also

Old Blogging Sites That We Thought were Gone

Blogger’s interface is really focused on the writing area and shows few other options. WordPress and Movable Type offer a much more complicated interface and have less screen space available for the write area. Tumblr uses a whole different approach as it revolves around the type of content you want to post (text, photo, quote, etc.)

In 2004 Tom Coates put up his whole blog archive in a text file for people to download and analyze. It contained five years of blog posts and people started making visualizations of his early posting behavior. There was a significant change in 2003 after Coates switched from Blogger to Movable Type and in response to that change he wrote:

Matt has suggested to me in the past that another equally convincing model might be to think of MT as having broken the paradigm of incredibly fast and easy informal peer-to-peer publishing that Blogger created and was initially its USP. (Coates, 2004)

Do you feel your blog software and interface influence how you blog?