Blog Tips – Part II Links, Landing & Leaving

Now that you’ve got basic navigation down (Blog Tips – Part I), it’s important to use that knowledge when you send someone a link to a blog; or when you arrive at a blog as a result of clicking a link to a blog.  We could have included this in Part I, but it’s so important I wanted to break it out for clarity. And we are all about clarity here at Not A Mystery.

So as we think about links to blogs, keep the following fact in mind

The blog stays in one place, but the posts move down the page.

This is a direct result of Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity. There, I managed to get that in, ooohhhh.

1] Sending a Link

OK, back to the link thing. Let’s say you went to your favorite blog this morning, with your cup of (very strong) coffee, to see what’s new in the blog sphere. Let’s also say that a post catches your interest, and that it  is either the first or second post at the top of the page on the blog. So you decide to share that post with a close friend by sending them a link to this page via email.

Keep in mind that you are sitting on the Home page of the blog, looking at both of those posts. The natural thing to do now would be to just copy the url from the browser window’s address bar and paste it into the email. But if you did that it would be your bad, because that link points to the blog’s Home page, not the post you are viewing.

If the recipient of your email clicks on the link right away, then there are no worries, they will see the same page you did when you sent the link. But if they wait a few hours or days, the post you wanted to share may have scrolled either down or off the front page of the blog.

The solution to this problem is simple. Just make sure you are in the Single Post View (discussed in Tips Part I) of the post you want to share; and then copy the address from the browser window. This way the link will always be pointing to that particular post no matter where it is sitting in the blog.

As I’m sure you remember, to get into Single Post View you can click on

• The title of the post,
• The ‘continue reading’ or ‘more’ link if the article has one,
• One of the ‘comment’ links for that post.

Any one of those actions will get you into the Single Post View and now the address of that post, which doesn’t change, is up in the browser’s url window. Copy that address and email away, you are good to go.

2] Following A Link In To A Great Landing

As you can guess, landing on a blog by following a link is like going in the door we just exited. As they told me when I was a novice pilot learning to land

Any landing you walk away from, is a good landing.

An observation that has consoled me over the years.

Often we will Land on a blog thru a link from another website. If the link was a ‘good‘ link it will take you right to the exact post that was represented. Keep in mind you have Landed in the Single Post View and not on the Home page of the blog. The post itself may be several months or years old;  it’s like checking into a hotel you’ve not visited before. Look around and don’t necessarily take the first room they offer.

You may want to explore the blog further, or return to where you were before you hit the link. If that’s the case, you can go to the Home page and see the most recent posts on the blog, usually by clicking a Home page link, or the Name of the blog up at the top of the page you landed on. If you want to leave the blog and return to where you were before you hit the link, just use the Back button on your browser or the Backspace key on your keyboard.

Remember: The Back button is your friend. When in doubt just go Back.

If, on the other hand, the link was a ‘bad‘ link you will have Landed at some other point in the blog and the particular post that was represented is long gone. But all is not lost. Unlike a real airport, you can always walk away from this Bad Landing. In this case you can look around the blog, or just cut your losses and go Back.

Next Up

In our next Blog Reading Tip I will go a little deeper, describing Categories, Tags, Archives and Commenting. I’ll tell you how the administrator sets up these options. We do have total power over what appears on our blog…it’s not much on the scale of real life, but as a control freak, I’ll take anything I can get!