A blogsite (like a Lexus) must be durable.

Very few people think about their blog content or blog architecture in the context of durability. When I mention it to people they say –

“What? How can you wear out your blog?”

Understanding blog and content durability requires a deeper understanding of the likelihood of future changes that would constrain or otherwise obsolete your content.

There’s no question there will be future innovations that will render the way blogs work today, as obsolete in a future context. Durable blogs will possess attributes that allow them to transform and reshape themselves with little effort. Non-durable blogs will require complete rethinking, rewrites and reformatting of large portions of content and application code bases; non-durable content will require significant reshaping to migrate into new use cases.

Your blogsite platform should be agile and buil;t on XML and XSLT services that are completely unrelated to blogging or blog architectures. Your advertorial marketing platform based on sound information architecture design.

One example of content durability is how MyST melds Captyx components into blog posts. By using embedded XML components components (for things such as embedded videos), we can [optionally] prevent them from displaying in RSS feeds. This is intentional and done so for many reasons – not all subscriber devices can display embedded videos, thus your blog content soon becomes less durable. But the behavior is critical to creating and managing a durable content system because it makes it possible to create, manage, and integrate content items with (and without) embedded objects.

This agility is critical to future requirements that have not [yet] been invented. Imagine the day comes when you have 10,000 posts and you suddenly need to utilize your content in ways that heavy objects (such as video components) are not able to be included. Your competitors (who have embedded video code directly into their content) will not be able to participate in such a new use case without significant friction – they are busy creating non-durable content that assumes all objects in a post must be included in that post regardless of the use case.

Examples of durability abound in MyST Blogsite® – from the native MyST-ML [XML] markup language available universally across the platform, to the URL-based XML API from which a variety of XML formats can be accessed. In between we find filter patterns that allow you to scope RSS feeds and subsets of your content as HTML, Topic Cloud, which dissects all keywords into a relational map to your posts, and Link Properties that can exist as reference bibliographies in HTML or free-standing syndication feeds.

Your blog content platform and posts should be designed with one assumption – change is coming.