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Jacci's Desktop Publishing Blog

By Jacci Howard Bear, About.com Guide to Desktop Publishing since 1997

Colophon: Your Technical Specs

Saturday February 25, 2006
The Web borrows heavily from print:
  • Books have titles. Web sites have titles.
  • Books have pages. Web sites have pages.
  • Books have colophons. Web sites have colophons.
While most readers of books and Web sites relate readily to titles and pages, colophon is a funny word that most of us don't immediately think about when we go to read or design a book or a Web site. But some Web designers picked up on the idea of a colophon and made it a page on the site that served to list all those geeky things like the software used to design the site, the fonts in use, and any other technical jargon that had no place within the content. Now bloggers have taken the colophon to a new level. Before blogs, the Web-version of the colophon -- like the book version -- was generally just one or two pages tucked inconspicuously behind a link at the bottom of the page (equivalent to the back of the book). But some bloggers are using tags and creating categories called "colophon" and filling it full of their entries on all things related to the care and maintenance of their blogs. For example:
  • Maniacal Musings: Uses a colophon category for blog entries dealing with adding a search function, changing software, using a new typeface.

  • Random Thoughts: Uses a colophon category too, for housekeeping-related musings about code, software, templates.

  • Graphic Tribe: Uses colophon as a tag on entries that talk about technical aspects of the site - color changes, code changes, and other things "under the hood" or that affect appearance.


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Related Technorati and del.icio.us Tags: | colophon | | book design | | web design

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