Give me a name

One of the things that annoyes the hell out of me while blogging is a missing name. Scrolling through the feeds, following the links, I often end up reading an interesting post at someone’s blog. I read it, I think about it, I want to blog about it. Naturally, I might want to provide a quote from the original post and a link back to full post, so that readers of my blog know what I am talking about and have a way to go and read the full post at the original location, if they feel so inclined.

And it’s when I am trying to be civilized that I often have a problem. It’s either an anonymous blog, or it just doesn’t have a name, or there’s no hint of how to address the author of the post.

As an opposite example consider my blog. It might be a bit too much, but I prefer too much to too little. The title of the blog is “Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov”. It’s up there on the header image and it’s also in the title of the browser window. And every post has an author’s name attached to it. That’s just in case I’ll allow someone else blog here or will some day write a way too smart Perl script that’ll post instead of me. Anyone quoting from this blog has enough information to write “Leonid Mamchenkov said…”.

But what do you do when you want to quote from a blog that doesn’t have any title and has not information who the author is. Sometimes it’s just empty. At other times it’s so general that it’s useless. For example: John’s blog. Which John? There are at least a couple of millions of them in the world. Or even worse: sexy baby’s diary. Right. Like we haven’t seen any sexy babies before.

So, for the sake of quoting sanity, I beg you to make it dead clear who is the author of the text. Either put it in the title, or sign with the author name, or have it somewhere on the sidebar saying “Quote this text as XYZ Cave” or something.

Thank you.