While thinking about how I use micro.blog and how I am using Drummer it occurs to me that both blogging platforms have the same problem with handling what I call long form writing. The root cause is the publishing of the full content of every blog post, regardless of whether the post has a title, on the home page.

To my eyes it makes no sense embedding a titled post that has multiple paragraphs on the home page because it just makes the home page too long. The reader ends up scrolling further and further down a page. Another problem is the reader sees these entries as just another blog post whereas I want such titled posts to be seen as a story or essay.

My ideal scenario would be a publishing platform that is smart enough to handle a couple of scenarios. One scenario would be to enable the writer to create what I will call an introduction post that has a title, a specific introduction that I wrote, and a link to the page with the full article. The idea is that a story, or essay, stands alone on its own page and one is simply writing a blog post to link to that page. Micro.blog even has a pages option that could support this, but it’s not integrated in the manner that I am suggesting.

The other scenario, or approach, would be for the blogging platform to just automatically limit a titled post on the man page to the title and three sentences, with a cut and a read more link. I emphasize I don’t want a publishing platform that requires titled posts, I want it to smartly handled untitled and titled posts and not necessarily treat them the same.

I’ve always held that a blog post is only one, maybe two paragraphs long and something longer is different, what I call stories but others may call essays. This very item you are reading right now is an essay, not a blog post, it just happens to be published on blogging platform. In fact, perhaps what I am advocating is for a web publishing platform that is more than a blog publishing platform.

I can manually implement this approach by only writing blog posts here and publishing stories on another site, but that forces me to maintain two sites and use two different writing flows that I have find fatiguing. My desire is to use one writing and publishing flow for both forms of writing.