As noted by Jason Clark, it seems that Bloglines has an issue with titleless posts. But, posts shouldn’t need titles – what do other blogs do with asides? How does Bloglines handle a blog like Dave Winer’s?
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Hi there! My name is Leslie Michael Orchard. I'm a serially enthusiastic, caffeine-dependent {web,mad,computer} scientist and {tech,scifi} writer working for the Mozilla Corporation and living near Ann Arbor / Detroit in Michigan.
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7 Comments
Bloglines puts a “permalink” link at the bottom of posts without titles. It’s less noticeable, but it works. I suspect there’s some subtle difference in the permalink and the title link; the title link doesn’t always go to the actual original blog post. I think the permalink shows up only if there isn’t a title pointing to the original post.
I think titles are helpful for old eyes like mine, unles all the posts are tiny short things.
I like your blog & good luck with delicious & CA!
not only bloglines has a problem with them. newsalloy.com too. But it seems that wordpress doesn’t like titleless posts either, because your blog’s pager at the top of the page (for going to the next/previous post) doesn’t display properly if the next/previous post has no title :(
Thanks Ian, I didn’t notice the ‘permalink’ link on Bloglines. Something similar might be nice here, Les, as your titleless posts don’t have a visible (clickable) permalink. The comments link provides a way to get the permalink, but it’s not exactly the same.
Having the permalink in Bloglines makes the title less important- all the posts appear in order, so the title only helps with skimming. As these are ‘asides’, I skimming the body is just as quick. I am curious about other aggregators. It’s been ages since I’ve used a desktop three-paned aggreagtor, such as NNW; I’d guess it’s like having an email in your inbox with no subject.
Asides are something I’ve been trying to sort out for awhile. They’re meant to be quick cast offs, maybe a paragraph at most, and certainly not ponderous enough to need titles. The idea is to be more like instant messages to the blog and its readers, rather than emails.
I’m reading your blog with BlogLines, and I can click the “Permalink” link on your titleless posts to load the blog entry.
NewsGator Online will excerpt the post for a title – for example, 2 posts ago showed up with the title as “Huh. Generally, I scoff at the idea of hand-holding…”. FeedDemon does the same. Some readers fall back on the pubDate if there’s no title, can’t think of a specific example but I know I’ve seen that.