What is the Difference between CrimsonBlog and CrimsonZine?

CrimsonBlog and CrimsonZine are both WebCrimson Starter Sites:

So what's the difference between the two Starter Sites? 

There's a Short Answer and a Long Answer.

The Short Answer is easy:

• If you're publishing long essays, articles, or poems, then use a CrimsonZine
• If you're posting frequent short notes, then use a CrimsonBlog

The Long Answer is a bit more detailed.  Actually, it's probably easiest to see the two in action for yourself.

• Here is a site created with CrimsonZine: Microcontent News Articles.
• Compare that to a site created with CrimsonBlog: WebCrimson News and Updates

There are two big differences between these sites:

1. A site created using CrimsonZine has more pages

The Microcontent News Articles zine has more pages than the WebCrimson News and Updates blog.  That's because each article in the zine gets its own page.  You can see for yourself here, in this snippet from the Microcontent News Articles index - click on either of these links and you'll see that the article is on its own page:

March 18, 2002 Introducing Microcontent News A New Magazine about Weblogs, Webzines, and Personal Publishing by John Hiler March 12, 2002 The Tipping Blog How Weblogs Can Turn an Idea into an Epidemic by John Hiler

 

Now compare that to a Weblog page.  In the blog snippet below, if you click on the red leaves at the end of each post, you can see that each post is on the same page.

Tuesday, June 25, 2002 I've written an article about the story behind WebCrimson: Blogs as Disruptive Tech - How weblogs are flying under the radar of the Content Management Giants posted by John - 5:33 am Monday, June 17, 2002 I've pulled together a quick features list for WebCrimson v 2.0, if you're curious what we do. posted by John - 10:42 pm

These red leaves are called "permalinks", and are special links that link to the exact location of each post on the page.  We install the permalinks for you when you create your CrimsonBlog (don't worry, they don't look like red leaves).

2. A CrimsonBlog site has just one field

Blogs are elegant in their simplicity: you fill out a single field and hit Publish.

Some people like to add a Title to each blog post, so we've added an optional Title field.  But other than that, that's about all the fields that go into each Blog Entry.  After all, blogs are popular because of their very simplicity.

Sometimes, though, you want to have more fields.  Take one of the articles in the Microcontent News Articles zine, for example:

• The Tipping Blog - How Weblogs Can Turn an Idea into an Epidemic - by John Hiler

You may notice that this article has at least three fields: a Title (The Tipping Blog), a Subtitle (How Weblogs can Turn an Idea into an Epidemic) and an Author name (John Hiler).  (And of course, it also has an Entry field for the body of the Article).

You can add even more fields if you want, including: a Summary field, an image unique to that article, or even a separate file for that article (say, a PDF version of that article).

So in summary, the two major differences between CrimsonBlog and CrimsonZine sites are:

• A CrimsonZine site puts each entry on its own page, while a CrimzonBlog site puts entries on a single page
• CrimsonZines have multiple fields, while CrimsonBlogs focus on the blog post (and an optional Title).

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