communication department

Volume XX Number 7

Creating a Table of Contents for Your Community’s Blog

By Phil Gochenour, Member, San Francisco Chapter

Weblogs (better known as blogs) provide an easy way to quickly publish content on the Web. They are especially useful when content is added or updated on a daily basis or several times a week. But one of their weaknesses is that entries are added sequentially, with new ones appearing above older ones. As entries accumulate, older ones are pushed off the main screen, and important information entered only days previously can be difficult to find.

The tagging mechanisms common in public blogging systems such as Blogspot and Blogger and user-installed systems such as Wordpress offer a solution that could come in handy for communities experiencing the above dilemma. A tag is a user-defined word that describes an entry, and most entries have several tags. Blogs will usually display all the tags on the front page, and users can either click on a tag in the list to see the entries associated with that tag, or they can click the tag within an entry. Tags are analogous to index terms, and, like their print counterparts, can accumulate rapidly. In my own blog about the San Francisco electronic music scene, I have over 300 index tags—most of them referring to the names of people, groups, events, or clubs—for 193 posts.

Index tags are useful for finding very specific information, but they aren’t a good mechanism for browsing general content. For this reason, I have created a second set of tags that I refer to as subject tags. These reflect the blog’s major content categories and provide the means for creating a blog table of contents.

Assume that you want to create a content category within your community’s blog called Upcoming Events. Create an entry and add the Upcoming Events tag to it. Save the entry and then click on the Upcoming Events tag. Regardless of the specific blog system, clicking on the tag will generate a new page that shows all the entries with that tag (I refer to this as a table of contents page for that tag). Copy the URL of this page.

On the front page of your blog, create a link list called Quick Links or Table of Contents or whatever you feel is appropriate. Create a new link by pasting the URL of the table of contents page, and name it Upcoming Events. After you’ve saved the new link, a user only has to click that link to see a page that lists all the pages you have tagged as an upcoming event. You can repeat this process for every content category that you will deal with in your community’s blog site, and you can easily add new content categories as you go along. My blog, for example, has subject area tags and corresponding pages for Friday Night Guide, Saturday Night Guide, Upcoming Events, and Event Reviews, among others.

Creating subject area tags is very easy and will dramatically improve the usability of your blog because it will enable users to focus directly on the content of interest to them without having to click through all of your index tags. If your community has a blog or is thinking about starting one, consider using the above steps to make your blog more inviting and user-friendly for your members.

Phil Gochenour holds a PhD in comparative literature, specializing in media studies, from Emory University. He has been involved with developing online media in a variety of roles since 1995, and is currently employed as a technical writer with CNET Networks in San Francisco.