All Drupal 7 sites start out with two basic content types—articles and pages—and Drupal gives you brief and handy descriptions of what each of these content types are. Articles are "time-sensitive content like news, press releases or blog posts" and Basic Pages are for "static content, such as an 'About us' page."
As the description of an "article" indicates, a Drupal article and a Drupal blog post are essentially the same thing. They both have a title, the date published and the author, the content of the piece, tags, and (if you enable it) the ability for people to add comments to what you've written.
That raises the question: What really is the difference between a blog post and an article? Is there a difference at all?
The answer lies in the nature of differences and distinctions. Give your average person two glasses of red wine -- a 2010 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon and a 2003 Alsace Pinot Noir -- and that person will probably say, "They both taste like wine." For the average person, there is no distinction, and yet for the connoisseur, the difference between the two is vast.
Functionally there is no difference at all between an online article and an online blog post. But if you're the type who pays attention to nuance, then you can see a wealth of differences between the two.
By association, articles are still tied to the world of old-school journalism whence they came (or "from whence" if that sounds better to you). Conversely, a blog post is current, contemporary.
There is a sense of formality associated with an article, again going back to the old days of journalism (and by "old days" I mean the 20th century), when articles were typically found only in printed media such as newspapers, magazines, trade journals and the like. Because printed publications were not nearly as nimble and agile as digital content, articles for these publications were typically written carefully, over an extended period of time, with close attention paid to grammar, spelling, punctuation, structure and style. By contrast, blog posts are less formal, more personal—more inclined to express the author's opinions, interests and experiences—and because digital media is so much more impermanent, so easily amended and so much more "of the moment," a blog post is the kind of thing one might dash off in a matter of minutes, with little attention to correct spelling, punctuation or grammatical nuances such as "whence" or "from whence."
In building this site, I have chosen to retain the Article content type that comes with Drupal, while creating a new content type called Blog Post. It's what I call buffet thinking: Why have only one entree when you can have two? And I've decided to publish this piece as a blog post, because it's more reflective of my personal thoughts on the matter.
I have a feeling most of the content I post on this site will be in the nature of a blog post. Somehow, I feel as if someone would have to hire me and pay me to write an article (although if someone wants to pay me to blog, my rates are equally reasonable). Maybe I'm wrong about this nuanced difference between blog posts and articles, or maybe I'm right but no one really cares. For my part, I'm a strong advocate of nuance, and while my Website doesn't really have much of a mission, per se—at least not yet—if it did have a mission, or if it had several missions, one of them would be to do whatever I could to champion the appreciation of nuance, because it's my impassioned belief that many of the best things in the world have come about as a result of paying attention to nuances, while ignoring them will, in my opinion, spawn the apocalypse.
But that's a subject for another blog post.