I’m sorry for leaving the series hanging. Ideally, I ought to be making a post per day.

This part, and the next will deal with blogging proper. I’ll be using two popular blogging platforms — Automattic WordPress and Google Blogger. For this part, we’ll be discussing signup, making a post, commenting, and customizing your layout.

Here’s some terminology we’ll be using:

Post

A single message, entry or article on a blog.

Theme

Visual design for a blog.

Template

Same as theme. Sometimes a template is used to refer to the customization of a theme.

Continue reading Of Blogs and Blogging III

Yesterday I laid some background work on what a blog is. Today, I’ll go into more in-depth analysis, using pictures where necessary.

Some of the common features which most blogs have include permalinks, two-way communication and syndication.

As the content of a blog’s home page is pretty dynamic, visitors to a blog need access to previous posts. The links to these posts are called permalinks — or permanent links — because theoretically they do not change.

The two-way comment system is basically a post and feedback system. When you make a post on your blog, visitors who’re interested in your topic usually leave comments on the site through a form or might link to a topic on your blog when making posts.

If you’re active in the blogosphere — as I am — you visit a lot of blogs everyday to check for new content and make comments. As the number of blogs you visit becomes larger, it becomes quite tedious. Most blogs syndicate, or offer an alternate format of their content called a feed. The two most common formats for syndication are Atom and RSS.

It’s a format which contains post titles and either excerpts or complete posts from a blog. As posts are made, the ‘feed’ gets updated. Using compatible software like Google Reader, Newsgator, Microsoft Outlook, or RSSBandit you can be kept updated on posts as they’re made and decide which ones to visit and comment on. People do not have to physically visit a blog to find out what content it has — usually, by looking at the titles in the feed, you can tell.

(Hint: if you’re using Internet Explorer 7 or any other browser, take a look at the address bar. You should see an icon like this if the blog has at least one feed).

The structure of most blogs is pretty much the same — a header, a sidebar and a content section with an optional footer. Typically, the header contains the blog title and description, the content section the posts, the sidebar contains links to other blogs (called a blogroll), and links to previous posts called archives. The footer contains copyright information. Click on the thumbnail to view a labelled profile of a blog, using mine as an example.

This is pretty rudimentary stuff for now. You may be wondering why you should blog. In my next post we’ll look at the advantages of blogging.

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<![CDATA[ Don't worry, o ye advanced bloggers (Vera take note!). When we get to Part 4 we'll discuss techniques and I'll be there to explain some stuff using Blogger and WordPress with lots of screenshots. We'll talk about pinging and XML-RPC, and some other mundane things. Never fear all ye ladies -- I won't 'geek-talk.' ]]>
</spoiler>

Article Index

1. Part I — Introduction
2. Part 2 — Features
3. Part 3 — Blogging basics
4. Part 4 — Advantages of blogging and problems
5. Part 5 — Advanced Blogging
6. Part 6 — Conclusion

I gave a speech sometime last week discussing blogs and spent a good nineteen minutes trying to convince my classmates to pick up blogging. Well, I hate talking, but I managed to spend 9 more minutes than the allotted time.

I’ll spend the next few posts discussing blogs and hopefully educating us on the blogosphere and what makes it tick, using excerpts from my speech. [I’m only doing this because there’s nothing interesting going on now].

While chatting with a friend online last week, he asked me, “I’d like to have a blog but I don’t know where to start.” When I asked him what he knew about blogging, he had no clue — he simply knew most of his classmates had one and didn’t want to be left out. He’s not the only one — I get a lot of questions like that from people who want to start blogging.

This presentation article is for those who don’t blog but are either curious about blogging, or have reservations about it. I’m going to be speaking informing you today about how to carve your own niche for yourself on the Internet through a blog.

We’re going to discuss blogs and blogging in general, the features of a blog, why you should blog, and the problems you’re likely to face while blogging.

Now, what is a blog?

The Encyclopaedia Britannica Online defines a blog or weblog as ‘an online journal where an individual, group, or corporation presents a record of activities.’

Blogs have been in existence since the beginning of the Internet — in fact, Tim Berners-Lee, often credited as the creator of the Internet, created what may have been the first blog.

At first, blogs were used by so-called computer geeks as a communication tool. Blogs evolved, the way computers, the Internet and email did so that you didn’t have to be tech-savvy to have one. It became as simple as login, type and post. Using services like Blogger and WordPress, one can be up and blogging in less than 20 minutes.

The blogosphere which is basically a subset of websites on the Internet has grown tremendously in the past decade. Technorati, a website dedicated to tracking blogs, as of October 2006 put the number of blogs tracked at over 57 million blogs, with over ten thousand getting started everyday, and the total number of blogs on the Internet doubling every 230 days. Of course this is hardly representative of the number of blogs that exist and estimates are as high as 100 million blogs.

If you’re not a blogger I’m sure you’re wondering what all the hype is about blogging and why blogging has replaced e-mail as the hottest fad among the young. According to The Baltimore Sun (the article has been deleted, but it’s available for a fee), among teenagers, blogging is a medium which teens have found helps them in asserting their identity, proclaiming their individuality or even rebelling. It’s not just teens who’ve been caught up by the fad — the owners of most of the blogs I read are between the ages of 20 and 30.

I’ve introduced you to what blogging is about. In my next post we’ll take a look at some of the features of a blog.

Article Index

1. Part I — Introduction
2. Part 2 — Features
3. Part 3 — Blogging basics
4. Part 4 — Advantages of blogging and problems
5. Part 5 — Advanced Blogging
6. Part 6 — Conclusion