Untitled posts? What could go wrong?

  • mitchwagner

    (@mitchwagner)


    7 years, 4 months ago

    As you can see from the link above, I run an old-school personal linkblog, like people ran in the early 2000s before Twitter, Facebook, etc. I publish a high volume of short posts, most of them just pointing to pages and articles that look interesting. I also post a lot of images, memes, etc. And I use WordPress with plugins to syndicate posts to Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter.

    I’m thinking of leaving titles off most of my posts, to make the process of posting and reading as frictionless as possible. I don’t want to just *hide* the titles, because then they’d show up in RSS and on Tumblr. I want to not use titles entirely.

    What are the downsides of doing this?

    Thanks!

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Moderator Steven Stern (sterndata)

    (@sterndata)

    Volunteer Forum Moderator

    7 years, 4 months ago

    1. Gomez!

    2. Titles have SEO value, as do the URLs that are created from them.

    3. A blog archive page will not have any links to the underlying posts. This may be OK if your theme shows the full content.

    4. Users expect titles.

    Thread Starter mitchwagner

    (@mitchwagner)

    7 years, 4 months ago

    1. Tish! You spoke French!

    2.I think I may be willing to forego the SEO value here as a tradeoff for a more fluid, fast-moving site. This is a hobby site; it is not (yet?) revenue-generating.

    3. This is a good point and something I need to look into. I do post full text rather than excerpts. Thanks.

    4. I think users understand titleless posts, after years of Twitter and Facebook and such. Also, there are a few die-hards still doing linkblogs on the free and open web, and they use untitled posts — See for example Scripting.com http://scripting.com/ and Instapundit https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/.

    4a. Untitled posts do, OTOH, make RSS readers barf. And I think the mail notifications that WordPress sends to subscribers put awful pseudorandom digits in place of the title.

    Also, I’m thinking of web-based linkblogging ever does come back — perhaps as a result of disillusionment with the big social platforms — it will look different than it did in the pre-Twitter/Facebook era.

    I do thank you for helping me think this through and I welcome other contributions to this thread.

    Joy

    (@joyously)

    7 years, 4 months ago

    It seems like WordPress is the wrong software for the type of site you describe.
    By its nature, each post is a web page, and each web page has an address and title (which in WordPress, title becomes address), not to mention comments. You can use post formats of link or chat, but really, it’s not set up for only that.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

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