Testing out how I want to format my longer posts.

I haven’t had this Micro.Blog site for long, but I’ve written at my other site – Sketchbook B – for almost 15 years.1  Over time, my long form blog posts there developed a pattern. I had a basic structure with headers, footnotes, divider lines and a bio at the end. And I want to replicate some of that here and needed a post to experiment with. This is that post.2

I’ve already been using an H2 as a subhead and I like the way that looks. Like many writers, I often want to add footnotes as I write. Over on Sketchbook B, I used asterisks, but since I’m writing in Markdown, that’s kind of a pain in the ass. So I figured I’d go with superscript numbers, which is more conventional anyway.3  I continue to use divider lines to separate the body of the post from the footnotes, and a second divider line between the footnotes and a bio.

I’m not sure what I want to do with the bio. I found that most of my traffic came from Google, so the reader was dropping in on my site with no idea who I was. For now, I’ve decided to go with the shortest one sentence bio that I could and set it at the end in italics.

One aspect that I haven’t yet decided on is images. On my Squarespace-hosted site, each post had a preview image and I’d include a post image. So far on bobwertz.com, I don’t need a preview image, but I do think I want to create some type of standard post image to include under the subhead. I’ll keep experimenting, but I feel good about my basic post format.

  1. I’m going to keep writing at Sketchbook B, but the content will be mostly Adobe Creative Cloud tips.
  2. I’m using a trial of MarsEdit right now. And I really love the preview engine that lets me see how this is going to look, even before I post it. Looks like I’ll be purchasing a license.
  3. I don’t love how the superscripts mess with the overall line spacing. It just feels wrong. I may try to come up with another approach.

Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina.