Blogging grew out of early publishing on the web, a mix of personal and news websites. A lot of this legacy still defines how blogs look and how they work. The header is like a newspaper masthead, the footer is similarly influenced by print publishing, and the column layout (including a sidebar and a main content area) is reminiscent of newspaper layouts. One major affordance of blogs is that they present posts in a kind of endless and ongoing timeline, in reverse chronological order, with pagination to limit the number of posts per page (like books).

The internet and the web are the other major influence on the blog format, such as the use of hypertext to including rich media and hyperlinks to other websites, or the use of widgets which bring content from other locations into the blog’s context. This is a result of the fact that the web is dynamic, with content stored in databases and presented to the user through the use of a content management system, with the look and feel controlled by templates. Authors don’t have to manually build every single page they publish, a lot of the code can be re-used or embedded from elsewhere. This turns the author’s focus to the content itself, rather than the context in which it sits.

This dynamism also enables rich metadata and posting properties (back-dating or forward-dating, viewing/editing permissions, drafting, etc.), none of which was possible in print media.