Advantage of a book over a blog or improving your blog

Previously, in order to find out the answer to a question that interests us, we went to the library or bookstore, found the bookshelf we needed, re-read many tables of contents, and only after that, after choosing two or three books, giving back almost the last money, we went home to carefully read each cover to cover. Now it’s enough to have the Internet, a search engine, and now we’re reading articles from something on the blog. It would seem that everything has become much simpler. But the book is this whole mountain of material devoted to a specific topic, and after reading the book, we not only found out the answer to the question, but also began to better understand this whole topic. Reading the same blog article, we just find out the answer to the question.

Introduction

Anyone who has ever written / tried to write a book knows that one of the most difficult moments is to give the material the correct sequence of presentation. Even within the framework of writing one article, it can be difficult to build your thoughts into something accessible to another person.
Blogs markedly made life easier for authors - no need to think about the general order of articles, no need to think about any additional explanations - the author writes only what he wants to write in the article, and the article has nothing to do with other articles (except for the general topic).
And this is precisely the consistency and integrity of the whole presentation that distinguishes the book from the blog (and the difference is clearly in favor of the books). The author of the book starts from the very beginning, from the simplest, which allows even a novice and ignorant reader to understand the material, and step by step to reach the most complex topics. In the case of a blog, the reader has to adapt more to the author, to search for incomprehensible moments of articles throughout the blog or somewhere else on the Internet (that's why there are “specialists” trying to do complex things, but not knowing the simplest thing).

How to solve the problem?

Trying to get an author to blog sequentially is stupid and pointless, he will have to spend more time and nerves, as a result, he will cease to share his invaluable experience. The solution should be simple for the author and convenient for the reader.
A relatively simple solution is to create a table of contents for your blog. The table of contents refers to some other principle of organizing all your articles, not just the time of publication. This table of contents in its essence will not differ from the table of contents in the book, in which, according to your logic, all the articles will be sorted.
The first objection is that most of this table of contents will initially be empty, and there is a possibility that certain points will remain unreported by the author (if the blog author is not interested in analyzing one or another issue, he will not do that). This problem can be solved simply - instead of these voids, you can specify links to other resources (for sure, these issues were covered by someone at least somehow, and you can help readers at least by indicating the source that helped you in due time) .
The second objection is why create a table of contents if you already have a tag cloud, and similar articles, and a bunch of other fashionable tools. The objection, by its logic, is similar to the question “Why sorting if there is a search?”. The table of contents allows you to sequentially read material, for example, from the simplest to the most complex, while with the help of search tools the reader has yet to find all this sequence for himself.
And it’s worth moving on to the main question:

And on what basis to sort?

The most obvious way that I have already mentioned is from simple to complex . In most cases, articles can always be placed in order of complexity. The difficulty in this case will be the necessary level of preparation of the reader before reading the article. The simplest examples are blogs that offer the reader different lessons. For example, designers' websites often try to teach something, and at the beginning of such lessons there is always a disclaimer - "this lesson is for experienced ..." or vice versa "lesson for those who are not yet familiar ...". But few of these sites offer sorting or searching by level of difficulty of the lessons, and this is a clear minus.

Another principle is to build on the material itself.and group articles. An example is blogs on the topic of design and usability, where at first there could be articles describing general rules and patterns, and then recommendations on specific elements and situations. Or blogs about personal development - not every author bothers to at least somehow tell the reader what to read in the first place, and what to do later.

Timing and alphabetical order are also principles by which articles can be dispersed. In which cases? For example, the IT Biography blog can be sorted alphabetically (by adding first and last names to the headings). Also, blogs that describe various old inventions and similar topics - posting articles as these very innovations appear would be much more convenient than posting them at the time of publication.

What should it look like?

It should look, oddly enough, as the most common table of contents. Do not display the announcement and any additional information - only the headings of your articles. With an average number of articles of 50-100 in a blog / section, the table of contents in a simple and compact form will show the reader its whole essence.

In the end

Of course, not all blog articles may fall into your table of contents, and this is normal. They can be easily listed after. The main thing is that we have managed to streamline all the material that is on your blog, created its integrity as an information source.

Unfortunately, I can’t give concrete examples of the implementation of such an idea, and because of this, the article is similar to the theory of assumption. But, I think, the most risky of the bloggers can evaluate and test this idea from their own experience.

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