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Homepage vs. Blog

About this Document

This documents explains the distinction between a homepage (or homesite) and a blog and why this site is not a blog. It is adapted from this post to the Linux-Elitists mailing list.

Table of Contents

Document Information

Written By:
Shlomi Fish
Finish Date:
28-April-2007
Last Updated:
28-April-2007

Licence

Creative Commons License

This document is Copyright by Shlomi Fish, 2007, and is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0 Unported (or at your option any later version of that licence).

For securing additional rights, please contact Shlomi Fish and see the explicit requirements that are being spelt from abiding by that licence.

The Article Itself

As you may know since the Internet boom circa 1996, many people started their own personal web sites. These sites were called “homepages”, or later-on “homesites” (which is the word that I prefer because homepage is just one page).

Now, blogs were a later phenomenon. What a blog (also known as “public journal”, “weblog”, etc) is is:

  1. A stream of posts on various topics, ordered by date.
  2. Usually has a web feed.
  3. Should have comments. I left Advogato due to this reason among others.
  4. Normally either personal, random or dedicated to a certain topic.
  5. Usually flat and non-hierarchical. At most has tags.

Now my homesite on the other hand, and several other homesites as well is:

  1. Organised in a tree (“About myself”, “Humour”, “Puzzles”, “Computer Art”, “Software”, etc.). The categories contain many resources not commonly present in a blog, and there for people to browse and see.
  2. Has a centreal navigation menu and sub-navigation menus. Most blogs are flat or at most have tags which are completely different.
  3. Has many resources that are not normally present in blogs. How many times have you seen a full 10,000-words-long story posted to a blog? Or pages that only contain links.
  4. Many of the pages there are constantly updated. A blog entry normally remains mostly static after a while, while the pages of my homesite are very dynamic.
  5. There are no comments in any of the pages. It’s a static HTML site. Had it been a blog, I would have made sure to give a nested comments facility. I admit that I often post a notice about them to mailing lists, news sites, web forums, etc. But they are not blog entries.

Now, I do have some weblogs and write in them often. But my home site is a completely different and much more impressive beast.

I realise there has lately been an inflation of those practically-all-blog home sites using Movable Type, WordPress, or their likes. Normally, the blogger maintains the front page of the site as a blog, and adds a page or two about other things. I personally always look down on such sites.