RESEARCH ZONE
Techy tips for family historians
Once the blogging bug bites, you’ll feel inspired to write new posts (articles) about your research progress. Blog content differs from traditional printed books and journals in that it tends to evolve without a grand plan, be organic and travel down different paths, wherever your interests take you. That’s the beauty of blogging; remember you are the writer, editor and publisher all rolled into one, so you are in charge of that content.
Conversely a printed publication will have a plan, a distinct set of posts, all providing structure with a nicely indexed contents page. That publication window is finite, between the time the posts are started and the moment it is completed and published.
A blog, being theoretically infinite in both content and time, does need extra thought to create structure and luckily there are some simple, yet powerful, tools available to help us with this. Enter categories and tags, two concepts which, once adopted, will improve your blog structure immeasurably.
What are ‘categories’?
A blog category is simply a title, whether a single word or phrase, that groups related posts together. Examples of categories would be ‘Family history’, ‘The GRAY family’, ‘Military ancestors’ or ‘Research trips’.