Platt Perspective at three years

This is my third anniversary posting to Platt Perspective and it is posting 1129 in a still actively ongoing process. And I find myself thinking back to the beginning of this endeavor as I write this posting. Three years is a long time; these past three years have seemed at least in retrospect to have flown by. I look over my directory pages and at what I have added here up to now and I find myself thinking of what I still have to add. So I enter my fourth year with mixed thoughts and feelings. Over the past three years this blog and maintaining it have become a pretty basic part of what I do and of my routine, but at the same time I am constantly struck by the newness and novelty of what I write, as I strive to always add something completely new to this blog and with every posting.

I find myself thinking more specifically about the separate directories and how they are organized and in how they connect together. One of my primary ongoing goals of this blog is that everything in it connect together as a single, hopefully relatively complete and seamless whole and as a single overall narrative. But with that in mind I find myself focusing here on one of those directories, now spread out over two pages – my Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development and its Part 2 continuation page.

I began with a general goal of outlining most if not all of the major career stages and steps that we face, and I began that with job search with all of its complexities, and both in general and in the context of a high overall unemployment rate and a difficult jobs market. I ended up adding some 100 postings to address that part of the overall jobs and careers topic area and then I transitioned over to consider on-the-job situations, opportunities and challenges, beginning with starting a new job and from day one through the first performance review at the end of the probationary period. And I advanced from there: working on a team and with colleagues, taking a first, entry level management position, advancing into middle management and then into senior management and more.

I finished what might be seen as a first pass at this overall topic area when I completed my series on boards of directors and then I circled back to start addressing significant gaps beginning with committees and committee participation, and projects and project management. My thinking was that they can and do involve participation from all levels of the table of organization so it would make sense to delve into them after at least touching on issues that arise at the various stages and levels of the table of organization per se. And after finishing my projects series, I have several more already planned to follow. But I am already fast approaching 300 postings in that directory and topic area so I have much of the basic framework I would cover in this directory at least touched upon. I have covered a lot of ground; I have barely scratched the surface and with significant gaps still left and with much still to address and discuss.

Some of my directories are perhaps less clearly organized into an overall pattern, and I cite my Business Strategy and Operations and its continuation page: Business Strategy and Operations – 2 as an example of that. But I would argue the case that even for areas of the blog like that, I do seek to address topic areas in a relatively systematic manner. And I leaven my writing and how I determine what to address next in it with the ongoing lessons of current events and ongoing business world and personal professional experience.

And I have to add that I have a few directories that I have set up but never really gotten around to populating – yet. I set up my Macroeconomics and Business directory very early in this blog with its first entry: Internet Companies, the New-Old Economy and the Mainstreaming of Innovation going live September 27, 2009. But I have only recently been adding to that directory at a more raid ongoing rate, with that mostly in the past year or so. I have also only recently started actively adding to my Outsourcing and Globalization directory – though I add in that case, I have also reconsidered what I would post to it too. My plan is to get to my still less active directories too and to more actively post to them as well.

This blog at three years is still an active work in progress. And I am just starting year four of that with much to go. And I finish this meta-posting – this posting about postings on that note. Meanwhile, you can find this and my other benchmark postings at Blogs and Marketing and at About this Blog.

Timothy Platt, PhD.

Platt Perspective at 1001 postings, and the Scheherazade number

I have been posting daily to this business and technology blog for well over two years now and in the course of that have reached a milestone of sorts. When Sir Richard Burton compiled his collected Tales of the Arabian Nights he had his interlocutor, Scheherazade relate 1001 of them. And every night she would tell one more tale, leaving it incomplete – a cliff-hanger to be continued the next night. My writings are very different in nature than those tales and I do not in any way claim them to be so memorable. But like the Tales, I write series of postings. And in my case I organize them into directories and cross-link between both series and directories. And in a fundamental sense all of this blog fits together into a single interconnected narrative: a single large and still growing story.

Scheherazade stopped at 1001 and I still have a long way to go with many loose ends and gaps that I would address. But 1001 is as good a place in this flow of discussion and narrative as any to pause and take stock of where I am and where this blog is and where it is going.

My web analytics dashboard show where clicks to this blog come from by country, and over the past two months I see activity coming from well over 70 nations. Over the course of the 1001 postings added live to date, a full reckoning of where my visitors come from would be still larger in geographic reach. But that number, 70+ in and of itself tells a story as to the increasingly global reach of the internet – and with traffic connecting Platt Perspective to visitors from every continent except Antarctica and with both heavily and sparsely online-connected countries included. When I see my web analytics I see the Ubiquitous of ubiquitously connected in action. And I have a relatively minor following and quite minor in comparison to the better known participants of the blogosphere. When I write of our emerging ubiquitous connectedness, my own direct experience validates that as a working principle.

I received a feedback note in response to one of my postings a few months ago that I have occasionally thought about, as its wording caught me by surprise. It was a request for information: “How do Platt graduates do in the real business world?” I have never thought of what I am doing here as developing a school of thought and I still don’t as that would require levels of grandiosity that I would not be able to sustain. Still the internet is, if nothing else, a place where 1001 and more schools of thought can spring up and thrive – and even the ones that would never have taken off and even the many that would never even have been started upon if limited by the preselecting filtering of more traditional print publication and other pre-internet forums. Web 2.0 has made this blog and so very much more possible, and for my blog as well as for a seemingly endless flow of other voices, and regardless of the overall stature or significance of any of what we bloggers individually offer. What we offer collectively holds a level and depth of value and meaning that is essentially beyond comprehension and still growing.

I write this blog and this posting in it as someone who has been published in the peer reviewed professional literature of standard print journals – and I know that I would never get to publish anything on the scale and day-to-day immediacy of this blog except as a blog. The internet and particularly the interactive internet of web 2.0 and social media is like that. It enables.

“How do Platt graduates do in the real business world?” Platt Perspective does well enough so that someone would be in a position to even ask that type of question. I invite reader feedback in answer to the question itself, simply noting that my hope is that at least some have found this of value and help.

A few months ago I added a guide page to this blog to help readers navigate its growing complexities: 1st things 1st – Navigating Platt Perspective. And I would also cite here my update on this blog itself that I posted as my 800th posting. I will be adding more expansion and continuation directory pages and otherwise looking for ways to make this continuing narrative easier to navigate and use, but I will keep writing to it. And I find myself experiencing an emotion as I write this, that I would not have expected. I have been thinking in terms of posting 1001 for quite a while now, and Scheherazade’s precedent. But I do not feel like I am finishing anything with this posting. I feel as if I were fast approaching a new beginning. What am I heading towards now as an accomplishment benchmark? I will leave that open and simply say I have a lot more I want to write about and share here. Meanwhile, you can find this and my other benchmark postings at Blogs and Marketing and at About this Blog.

Platt Perspective at 800 postings – complexity and scale, and the challenge of a long-term blog

I began this blog over two years ago now and with daily postings (and occasionally two in a day as with today) I have now reached 800 short essay installments. That comes to some one million and more words and that means complexity and scale have long since becomes issues of concern.

If I was simply posting short shelf life notes, of a type that no one would read as they age – if my goal was to be current and of-today, with little if anything of lasting value and with little need to connect back to older content, scale and complexity would not matter. The problem with my blog is, however, that everything connects together into a single ongoing narrative, as I discussed in outline in my 700th posting a few months ago and as I explicitly write about in my 1st Things 1st – Navigating Platt Perspective. And with each posting the overall volume and complexity of material covered expands by that tiny increment more.

I started out planning for scale early when I started adding and adding content to my blog directory pages, as are found along the right margin in the template design I use. And that has held me in good stead. But with over 200 postings in two of those directories already I have found it necessary to split off new second page directories too. And there, I had a decision to make.

If I set up finer grained types of directory page, the directory menu would be much longer. And if I limited the number of postings that would be included in any one directory page, splitting off a page 2, 3 and so on sooner, that would also lead to directory listing complexity and clutter. I currently have 18 directory pages and if I had decided to limit the maximum number of postings per page to 50 rather than approximately 200, I would already have to include 13 more at minimum. And that is just for now.

200 postings listed on one directory page is too many and I know that, but having 50 directory pages and more would render all of them and the number of links on them moot.

When you build and maintain and grow a complex blog with everything on it potentially of current interest and all of it interconnected and linked together, scale and complexity become matters of decision for which there are no perfect answers. This is my 800th posting, and I have to think of reaching the Scheherazade number of 1001 this next Spring, and of reaching 1600 and more too, with time. That, I add would only mean a little under four and a half years worth of daily postings.

So I pause at with 800th posting to share some thoughts on scale and complexity, and on developing from the beginning to at least try to accommodate their needs. I also pause here to remind myself, even if no one else, that there are and can be not perfect solutions to the challenges that scale and complexity bring.

I am sure to return to this general topic in other contexts as I continue adding to this blog.

You can find this posting in About this Blog and also in Blogs and Marketing.

Bringing Platt Perspective into focus and admitting my ambition for it – some thoughts at 700 postings

The word weltanschauung comes from the German words welt (world) and anschauung (view) and is defined in either German, or in English as a borrowed word, as meaning “a comprehensive conception or understanding of the world.” A weltanschauung is generally posited as explaining, or encompassing some specific standpoint. Basically, a weltanschauung is a world view that seeks to offer an overarching explanatory framework and perspective for some large area of understanding or experience.

This is my 700th posting to Platt Perspective, and I was not planning until recently to make special note of this particular numerical milestone. But a recent conversation with a friend about this blog and what I am doing with it has prompted me to reconsider. And I want to both briefly outline something of this conversation here, and discuss a little of my thinking coming out of it, as to where I see this blog going.

My friend and colleague is a teacher, and a writer of text books, and his approach was very simple. I should in effect carve up Platt Perspective, mining it for content and topic areas for writing some number of books. I should use the postings as first draft entries, and document them with references and correct them as to writing style according to a standard, academic format to produce a (loosely connected) set of text books, from which I would derive royalties as an author. And I would winnow out and set aside, if not discard anything that did not fit into my specific book-organization plans.

That approach is very nice, and I am sure it would be worthwhile doing, but it overlooks a few details that are important to me. The first is that I see everything I have been including in this blog as connecting together to form a single, perhaps wide ranging narrative. And the second, I wish to write about here. And in a fundamental sense I gave away that point with my opening paragraph, above.

I have the audaciously ambitious goal of seeking to outline at least a rough, first draft version of a weltanschauung for the 21st century for businesses and marketplaces, and for the people who work in them and collectively comprise them. But my ambitions do not simply stop there. I see the emergence of our all the time and everywhere connected ubiquitous computing and communications capabilities as marking a fundamental turning point in human history, and I seek to map out at least the first tentative steps in that ongoing process.

Online social networking in the context of business, and separately for the arts, and the other topics I write of here all fit into this with for example my

• Ubiquitous Computing and Communications – everywhere all the time

touching on the emerging context that this will play out in, and my

• Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development and
• Social Networking and Business

seeking to offer tools for helping individuals as they experience all of this change in the global marketplace.

Platt Perspective is a rough draft at best, quickly written and in a real sense organized as it grows – organically. But it is an attempt at drafting a widely comprehensive snapshot, and of where we are now and where we are going. Information and its co-creation, storage, distribution and use, and its conversions from data to knowledge throughout this, are all central to the changes I write of. So to cite one more crucial topic area I have sought to address, I cite my Macroeconomics and Business directory. And yes, some of my directories at this point are still virtually empty stubs and placeholders that I expect to expand upon.

That is, among other reasons why I have written of expanding this blog at least to the 1001 postings count in overall scale, in reaching what I refer to as the Scheherazade number. That number of individual stories offered her room to in effect weave a comprehensive picture with her Arabian Tales and my thought is that the same would probably be enough for me to at least begin bringing my intended weltanschauung into something of a focus too.

So for now I will simply keep thinking, writing and posting and put off any selective redactions and more polished drafts for possible future endeavors – whether that would be for print or entirely for online. If I really am writing this for the 21st century that would probably mean online by default. Meanwhile, I have a great many more specific postings and series in mind, and tomorrow I will be posting number 701.

Patterns of popularity – an unexpected web analytics finding for this blog

I wrote a while back, as I crossed the 500 postings mark this past December that I was probably not going to post specifically about this blog per se again for a while, and at the time I was thinking of my 800th posting. Then I found myself looking at 65 comments in feedback that all came in on one day and that almost all simply noted interest in one of my specific directories: Startups and Early Stage Businesses (see my March 20, 2011 posting for details on that.)

I wanted to comment on that, as my most popular directory for quite a while was my Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development and now it was this. And I decided to leave this set of issues there and to keep posting on-topic and on the blog, rather than specifically about it. Then I recently received a comment that has prompted me to change my mind again, though in this case this posting is not so much about this blog, as it is about something that working on this blog has highlighted for me about the online marketplace.

I found a comment in my spam filter, and it probably ended up there because of the sender – an online “pharmacy” that sells prescription drugs of select sorts but with no questions asked (aside from credit card information) and with no prescription needed. Spam offers of low cost Viagra and the like are usually simply be deleted without thought. But this was a well written comment involving browser options for handhelds, and from both a business and site provider, and from a customer and site user perspective. This was submitted by someone deeply interested in more effectively reaching out to their target market and in developing completed business transactions with them, and in the user interface issues that could facilitate or thwart that.

The same issues that this blog visitor raised could just as easily have come from someone from a more standard online pharmacy or from most any other type of online business, that sees significant market share potential in handheld channels and for the rapidly growing mobile online demographic. And that left me with a decision.

I did not set this comment to go live to the blog and respond to it there, as such as I did not want to add a link to this type of business to my blog as if I were trying to help drive business to them. But this comment did raise genuine and significant questions and issues, and of a type I do write about. So with some reflection before writing this, I decided to respond as a separate posting, and yes I will put together a series in which I will address some of the questions raised. And I will think about how this request came about.

Online can and does encompass the whole spectrum of humanity and all that we do and seek to do – and that includes business ventures that we would or would not seek to patronize or in any way support.

And with the all-inclusiveness of that in the online experience I chose to include this in my Ubiquitous Computing and Communications directory as well as on my About this Blog page.

A blog update in response to 65 comments

I was not planning on posting an update about this blog itself again, at least until I hit the 800 postings mark. But I decided to post an “about” note earlier, and in response to feedback received.

I have said several times that I will respond to comments received from readers and I have, at least where they discuss specific details and topic areas that I do or would post on. I have in fact run a number and variety of series in response and follow-up to reader comments and feedback. But I also get a fairly significant number of comments simply saying that they find value in my blog or some series or specific posting in it, that their brother or sister or a friend or colleague recommended they read it, or that they find it helpful or interesting. I do appreciate that and I would like to thank all of you for reading my postings. I would also specifically like to thank those of you who help me with vital marketing too in spreading the word about this endeavor. But I admit I feel uncomfortable about simply posting brief comments of support where I do not have a specific content-oriented handle to respond to. I guess I would find that self-aggrandizing. And this morning I checked my blog to add today’s posting into the appropriate directory listing and I found 65 of these comments waiting for me!

Thank you. This means a lot to me to know that you like and even value what I am doing here. I decided to post a general note in response and here it is. I will strive to keep this blog and my postings to it interesting, relevant and useful – and hopefully at least a bit entertaining as well.

Tim

Platt Perspective at 500 postings

This is my 500th posting in my Platt Perspective blog and I have been doing a great deal of thinking about what I am doing here, what I seek to do and about blogging in general. 500 marks a milestone, and this one comes a few days before the end of one year and the beginning of a next – another milestone of sorts.

• My ongoing collective story in this has become more complex but I still seek to assemble it from individual postings that are at least intended to offer some value in and of themselves if taken separately.
• At the same time I still seek to keep everything connected so that together they do tell a single story as well.
• I have added new series within my basic directory pages since my last blog update posting at the one year anniversary mark, but so far at least I have resisted the temptation to add a new directory page. I have considered that with a new one on Information Security and Cyber Conflict, and I still may add that.
• A lot of what I am posting now deals directly and specifically with issues I am currently involved with professionally – not a complete departure from earlier postings but I have added a lot of what I would see as background information and perspective to build from.
• I still have a lot of ideas I want to post on, in telling a fuller story.

I keep using the word story here, and as factual and analytical as I like to keep this blog I am still presenting my ideas and perspective and telling my story about complex issues. And where is this all leading? My blog is a work in progress and I am still somewhat figuring that out as I go along. Right now I am at least tentatively planning to continue this at least until I reach and surpass what I would call the Scheherazade number of 1001. Even just doing that would mean daily postings for call it 72 more weeks. I will decide then how I wish to proceed. For now and through the foreseeable future I will be posting a short essay every day and with no exceptions.

I write this because I enjoy writing. But more than that, I keep adding to this blog because I owe so much to so many who have offered me advice and wisdom over the years. I seek to acknowledge that through the action of reaching out to help others in turn, or at least to entertain them a little.

I would end this posting with a brief final thought and it is one that specifically addresses a concern that has come up several times recently in taking with colleagues on the job. The concern is about maintaining a business blog with an ongoing, consistent, sustained effort. If it is important enough to you, you will find the topics to write on, the energy and will to write, and the staying power to keep doing this. If you do not see value in continuing this effort, no amount of content ideas or opportunity will be sufficient to keep you posting. In my case I find maintaining and continuing this blog to be a source of joy and satisfaction, and yes one of discovery as well. I have been learning at least as much as I have been sharing, simply from systematically thinking all of this through and writing it down.

So here I am at the 500 mark and I think back to my first posting and to how I set up an initial commitment point to blog. I have been following through on that commitment and I now renew if for another 501 postings and more – still leaving me something less than half way through. That seems right to me, and a good point to proceed on from. And tomorrow I will add posting 501.

Platt Perspective at 300 postings – a window into your expressed needs and priorities

I have been offering periodic updates on this blog and how it is going for issues such as readership size since I first started actively posting to it. I have also seen some apparent trends emerging from my web analytics data as to what people who find this blog find in it of interest, and of enough interest to come back for more.

I have, to follow up on my earlier updates, seen my daily and weekly site visit numbers go up and down and back up again in the matter of ocean swells, and that has not changed. And the basic trend has been to increasing readership and certainly when monthly totals are considered. The numbers for subscriptions to the blog have trended up too, but that type of detail is not what I want to focus on here, as gratifying as I find this interest in what I write. I want to take a look at those trends in what people show interest in here, and relate it to some data from outside of the blog and its readership per se.

The most popular general area I have been running is my Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development, now running 84 short essay postings and growing. I am rapidly approaching 2000 visits to this directory page alone in the most recent couple of months and with more added daily. I have been running several series within this Guide and my job search oriented series within this have garnered significant levels of interest, and certainly for my 17 part Plan B job search series. This would at best qualify as anecdotal evidence if used as a window into the larger world of business and career, but this pinhole view of that larger world would suggest that people who come to Platt Perspective, at least, are still very concerned about jobs and employment issues.

I have seen the visitor rate to this directory page drop a bit on a per day average since I have moved on (for now) to look at best practices for those who have already found and started a new job with its probationary period. Admittedly over-interpreting the data, this suggests to me that people seem to still be more focused on finding that next job than on what to do when they have landed it. Interestingly enough, my switch to that series coincided with a jump in my active subscriber count. Do I have fewer readers of this Guide but more consistent ones? I am not sure as I do not have the data to answer that, but it is an interesting question. Web analytics often offers data that can help answer questions and even definitively answer them, but it also tends to raise questions for which the evidence can only offer tantalizing suggestions. As a real content point here, I advise that it is really important to understand the limits of these tools, as over-interpretation of web analytical and other business-information statistical data can turn them into numerical equivalents of Rorschach tests.

Still, our current job market persists in the United States and in a lot of other places and with unacceptable levels of people out of work or under-employed and looking. It is not necessarily that much of a leap to see some meaning in data that would suggest this may be a preoccupation for this large segment of what should be our actively employed overall workforce.

As an aside, I strongly recommend that anyone who is still looking also look into developing best practices for that next step too, whether from my new job series in the Guide (see postings 73 and following) or elsewhere. This is definitely important for anyone in need of a Plan B job search as that means your skills in working in a team and on the job may be a bit rusty and this series is designed to offer tools to help you get off to a smooth start.

On a different note, my blog, or at least several specific series I am running in it, is now being translated into multiple languages with Korean the most recent one I have been explicitly told of. Russian was one of the first and others have also been added.

Looking forward, I currently have two new posting series planned and one of them is going to be directed towards people still looking for that next job – and also to people in business who are at least considering hiring. This one is going to look into the combination of issues in our economy and our business environment that are coming together to shape our current employment situation – and with an approach for dealing effectively with this context in looking for work, and in looking for job candidates.

I will also continue posting on a wide range of topics and issues related to business and social networking. In that regard, some of my postings (e.g. Robin Dunbar and the limits to social networking – a fundamental question of purpose and definition as a recent example) seem to have caught above average levels of interest. Thank you.

I will probably hold off until my one year anniversary mark for my next blog status update posting.

Thank you for your interest and for your comments and feedback,

Tim Platt

A blog update at 250 postings and counting

Yesterday I was thinking about this blog and what I have posted to it over the past months – and with this one I have now added 250 postings and at an average of something over 1000 words per posting that amounts to over a quarter of a million words total. When I started writing and posting here I did not think in terms of numbers, either for posting or word count totals and I still find that to be a more minor issue, but it is interesting how the postings and words accumulate. And I find myself with so many proposed posting topics I want to add into the mix I have some topics I really want to add that have been waiting for weeks. I have been busy enough here so that I am still not ready to get to them yet.

If I have learned anything from this ongoing exercise it is that if you are interested in what you blog about you will not run out of material to write about.

I will probably hold off on posting a next “About this Blog” update until I hit the one year anniversary mark. My readership numbers continue to grow and that I find very rewarding. I enjoy the blog comments I get and responding to, and the emails that I receive because of this blog too. Thank you for helping to create some very real conversations here.

Tim Platt

Blogging as more than just a format – making blogging work for you and at whatever scale your blog grows to

A few days ago I received a blog comment that I saw as important enough to merit a full blog posting and not just a quick comment reply. The comment itself said in part “I need some advice for my blog….I like your layout. Can you help me?” I want to try and help, and by sharing from my own experience with this blog and from working online in general. I want to start that by pointing out two series I have been posting to:

• Blogs and Marketing.
• About this Blog.

What follows here connects with other postings I have already added where I have already discussed at least some of the key aspects of search engine optimization and a few other issues as they relate to blogs. Here the topic is one of formatting and layout.

When you are just starting out and have what is essentially a blank slate in front of you with your new blog, formatting and layout do not matter. What little there is, is all there in front of you and all at once and on the home page screen without clicking to view older content, and for most everything you have added that is public facing. As you add more and more content this situation quickly changes, and I bring in a web developer’s term here as it addresses a suite of issues that are important to any ongoing online presence – information architecture.

In essence information architecture is what you do to help your site visitors find the information and other resources you offer online. It is a design approach and it is your roadmap that you offer to help people navigate their way around, and hopefully with sufficient ease and with sufficient ongoing presentation of value so they stay on your blog site and do not just click away not to return.

So this posting is about developing your blog so that it scales up in content size gracefully and so your readers do not start getting lost as they try to find their way around.

Start with your template selection. Pick one that connects with and supports your brand, but be sure that you can find things on a blog that uses that type of template. If in doubt, take a tour of at least one other site with a similar template and see if it is easy to navigate or if design artistry exceeds functionality. Find the options and features that you can use. For my blog at http://plattperspective.wordpress.com that means:

• A clean design with a well positioned posting area.
• And About feature where I could provide some quick orientation (About the Author and About Platt Perspective.)
• Ability to set up directory pages. I did not start with them on day one but I started out knowing I would need them to help organize my posting series as they grew in numbers and lengths. I now have 15 of these navigation tool pages, showing in the template on the right under About the Author, About Platt Perspectives and the options areas for subscribing to email and RSS feed updates. These are crucial. If the only way to scroll back through my blog to older postings was the Older Postings/Newer Postings tool at the bottom, a visitor might have to scroll back almost 30 long, long screens worth to find what they were looking for and that is just with my first six month’s worth of postings! The directory pages keep my postings easy to find in order and by topic area and category type.
• I have Topic Categories and Archives by month set up as pull down options as these tools become less and less effective, at least for older content as the numbers of postings climb. I do, however still keep them actively showing as it is important to help your readers by giving them options to chose from, and a lot of blog readers like to search this way. Besides, if you know that something of interest came out in some specific month but you cannot remember its title, this may be the best and even the only way to search and be able to find it. Always allow for the reader and their needs by offering options.
• I added a cloud category option as a Web app where the size of the font scales according to the proportion of overall postings that are entered into any given category. This type of tool helps your readers to quickly see where you have your focus in what you blog about.
• Always make sure your category labels are clear and readily understandable and add new ones as needed. You do not want to code your category names in a private dialect unless you are the only one you expect or want to have read your blog.
• I blog in text and do not add a lot of graphics, but many and perhaps most blogs do take a much more graphical approach. Make sure that the blog template both accepts and works effectively with every type of content you might want to add – plain text, tables and graphics definitely included. Once again, take a tour of blogs with the same or similar templates that you are considering to see how those blogs show with significant amounts of content in place.

I have not cited every feature available on blog templates, and have even left out some of the features I use on my own here. I wanted to focus on the core elements for formatting and design per se here. But look at the web apps and other add-on features you can pick up on and add into your mix. Look for scalability there too. I did not, for example start out using the cloud category option web app that is on my blog now and instead added it when I had enough content showing for it to make sense.

As a final thought, you set up a blog and start posting to it and it slowly but surely begins to grow. You might post daily or once a week or on a less regular schedule but unless you delete older content it will grow anyway. And with time all the issues I raise here and more will start to become very important and certainly if your older content is more than just throw-away. Most people do see potential value in their older postings too, so you need to prepare for this. The earlier you start preparing for scalability the easier it will be and the key to that is in effective formatting and design. Oh, and make sure your font is readable too.