I’ve written previously about anonymous blogging, and if that’s really what you want to do, by all means do it. However most of us are rather proud of what we write and aren’t trying to hide our identity. Nonetheless many bloggers effectively hide without realizing they’re doing it. If you do want people to know who you are, do yourself and your readers a favor: sign your posts.

I probably notice this more than most because I’m often trying to figure out who wrote a given post to attribute a quote for Cafe au Lait or Cafe con Leche. However, I suspect even casual readers like to know who’s writing something. Identity is important whether it’s your legal name or a pseudonym such as “Why the Lucky Stiff”. Especially when many people arrive at a post from links on other sites, it usually isn’t obvious who wrote any given post.

This may seem strange if you’ve been pouring out your personal life on your blog for the last two years. Of course people know who you are! But do they really? Do they know your name? Many readers haven’t been following along for all that time. Even if they have, they probably see the names of your spouse, children, co-workers, cats, and colleagues more often than they see yours. When we refer to ourselves, we write using “we” or “I”, rarely our actual names, even though this is one of the key pieces of information any reader is going to use to figure out who we are.

Sometimes your name is available on an “About Me” or “Contact Us” page, but that makes the user go hunting for it, and few will bother. Put your name on every page and make it as prominent as reasonably possible. This site puts my name (“Elliotte Rusty Harold” if you were wondering) in the upper right hand corner of the page. On Mokka mit Schlag, I even add a picture to go with it.

Perhaps even better is to include the author after the title of the entry or after the page, like an e-mail signature. This is especially critical on group blogs where different people write different pages. Immediately after the title is probably the best place to position the name because readers don’t always get to the end. E.g.

Sign Your Posts

By Elliotte Rusty Harold

If you do put your name at the end, put it at the end of the post, like an e-mail signature. Don’t restrict it to the bottom of the page after potentially dozens of comments few readers will wade through. You can put your name there too if you like–redundancy is OK–but a fine print copyright notice is not enough. Let us know who you are in big bold type, ideally right at the front.

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Elliotte Rusty Harold

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 at 6:26 am and is filed under Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Atom feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.