How to read my blog

I've spent a large part of my professional existence (not only in France, but in Australia too) teaching people how to use computers in one way or another. So, it's hardly surprising that I should think about explaining how to read my blog, because I know that such things don't necessarily "come naturally" to newcomers. In a previous post, I talked about sending in a comment to the blog. This time, I intend to deal with the sidebar links, to the right of the actual articles.

At the top, in the ABOUT ME zone, there's a button labeled VIEW MY COMPLETE PROFILE. In fact, you won't learn much by clicking this button, but it's a standard feature of all blogs such as mine, administered by Google.








The next sidebar zone is labeled LINKS, and the buttons point to three of my websites.




Next, there's a zone labeled PREVIOUS POSTS which, as its name suggests, contains buttons that take you to some (but not all) of my previous blog articles (called posts in blog jargon).








Finally, down the bottom, there's a small but important sidebar area labeled ARCHIVES, which enables you—often in an indirect manner, involving several steps—to display all the articles I've written, starting with the post of 9 December 2006 whose title was Why have I created this blog?

Incidentally, one of the things I never know with certainty is how my blog is actually displayed on other computers. When I publish a new article, I have to do a fair amount of tweaking to position correctly the graphics and the text. In doing this, I'm looking at my blog as it appears on a Macintosh running the Firefox browser. Maybe it looks quite different on other platforms.

That's all I'll have to say of a didactic nature. I ask readers who knew all this already to excuse me for being pedantic.