I mentioned in an earlier entry that in planning this blog I’d resorted to tracking down some of my previously published material that I could use as sample text.

In visualising how your posts, pages and links might appear and link together in practice, it’s preferable to be working with real text and images. However, getting that material together can be problematic if your time is limited. You simply don’t have the ideas or energy to fill five or six starter pages with original musings or expert opinion and you don’t want to lift text from other sites and be accused of plagiarism.

The solution is as obvious as it has been for the past five centuries, although I admit I’d overlooked the possibility of turning to Lorem Ipsum for inspiration. This is the Latin dummy placeholder text that’s been in standard use in the printing and typesetting industry since 1500. It looks cool, and its funky content is a lot more engaging than producing random text by pummeling your keyboard with both fists!

At least your new website might resemble something worthy of publication after you’ve tweaked the images and typography, or tried out a dozen theme variations via the WordPress or Blogger platforms. For added spice, you could even pass your Lorem Ipsum output through a machine translation program, just to see how your website might be received by speakers of other languages!

Beware, you might find when using an online translator that the Lorem Ipsum survives while your own native language is corrupted beyond recognition. Get used to it, as hundreds of readers the world over habitually read auto translations that bear no resemblance to the source material.

Seriously, the lesson is to stick to Lorem Ipsum when planning your blog and focus on consistency of line length and word count, especially in headlines and stand-first text panels. It is supposed to represent the typical distribution of characters in English and is certainly more accurate and efficient than typing out a thousand times, “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog!”

Ironically, Lorem Ipsum looks like it should mean something profound in Latin, but has never claimed to be the word of God, unlike every other language on the planet… and many a blog!

Generate your own text here: http://www.lipsum.com/

Tags: design, language, Lorem Ipsum, typography
Categories: blogging

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 8.15 pm and is filed under blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.