"Blog" is an abbreviated version of "weblog," which is a term used to
describe web sites that maintain an ongoing chronicle of information. A
blog features diary-type commentary and links to articles on other Web
sites, usually presented as a list of entries in reverse chronological
order. Blogs range from the personal to the political, and can focus on
one narrow subject or a whole range of subjects.
Many blogs focus on a
particular topic, such as web
design, home staging, sports, or mobile technology. Some are more
eclectic, presenting links to all types of other sites. And others are
more like personal journals, presenting the author's daily life and
thoughts.
Generally speaking (although there are exceptions), blogs tend to have a few things in common:
- A main content area with articles listed chronologically, newest on top. Often, the articles are organized into categories.
- An archive of older articles.
- A way for people to leave comments about the articles.
- A list of links to other related sites, sometimes called a "blogroll".
- One or more "feeds" like RSS, Atom or RDF files.
Some blogs may have additional features beyond these. Watch this
short video for a simple explanation for what a blog is.
The Blog Content
Content is the
raison d'être
for any web site. Retail sites feature a catalog of products.
University sites contain information about their campuses, curriculum,
and faculty. News sites show the latest news stories. For a personal
blog, you might have a bunch of observations, or reviews. Without some
sort of updated content, there is little reason to visit a web site more
than once.
On a blog, the content consists of articles (also sometimes called
"posts"
or "entries") that the author(s) writes. Yes, some blogs have multiple
authors, each writing his/her own articles. Typically, blog authors
compose their articles in a web-based interface, built into the blogging
system itself. Some blogging systems also support the ability to use
stand-alone "weblog client" software, which allows authors to write articles offline and upload them at a later time.
Comments
Want an interactive website? Wouldn't it be nice if the readers of a
website could leave comments, tips or impressions about the site or a
specific article? With blogs, they can! Posting comments is one of the
most exciting features of blogs.
Most blogs have a method to allow visitors to
leave comments. There are also nifty ways for authors of other blogs to leave comments without even visiting the blog! Called "
pingbacks" or "
trackbacks",
they can inform other bloggers whenever they cite an article from
another site in their own articles. All this ensures that online
conversations can be maintained painlessly among various site users and
websites.
The Difference Between a Blog and CMS?
Software that provides a method of managing your website is commonly called a CMS or
"Content Management System".
Many blogging software programs are considered a specific type of CMS.
They provide the features required to create and maintain a blog, and
can make publishing on the internet as simple as writing an article,
giving it a title, and organizing it under (one or more) categories.
While some CMS programs offer vast and sophisticated features, a basic
blogging tool provides an interface where you can work in an easy and,
to some degree, intuitive manner while it handles the logistics involved
in making your composition presentable and publicly available. In other
words, you get to focus on what you want to write, and the blogging
tool takes care of the rest of the site management.
WordPress is one such advanced blogging tool and it provides a rich set of
features. Through its
Administration Panels, you can set options for the behavior and presentation of your weblog. Via these
Administration Panels, you can easily compose a
blog post,
push a button, and be published on the internet, instantly! WordPress
goes to great pains to see that your blog posts look good, the text
looks beautiful, and the html code it generates conforms to web
standards.
If you're just starting out, read
Getting Started with WordPress,
which contains information on how to get WordPress set up quickly and
effectively, as well as information on performing basic tasks within
WordPress, like creating new posts or editing existing ones.
Things Bloggers Need to Know
In addition to understanding how your specific blogging software works, such as
WordPress, there are some terms and concepts you need to know.
Archives
A blog is also a good way to keep track of articles on a site. A lot
of blogs feature an archive based on dates (like a monthly or yearly
archive). The front page of a blog may feature a calendar of dates
linked to daily archives. Archives can also be based on categories
featuring all the articles related to a specific category.
It does not stop there; you can also archive your posts by author
or alphabetically. The possibilities are endless. This ability to
organize and present articles in a composed fashion is much of what
makes blogging a popular personal publishing tool.
Feeds
A Feed is a function of special software that allows "Feedreaders" to
access a site automatically looking for new content and then post
updates about that new content to another site. This provides a way for
users to keep up with the latest and hottest information posted on
different blogging sites. Some Feeds include RSS (alternately defined
as "Rich Site Summary" or "Really Simple Syndication"), Atom or RDF
files. Dave Shea, author of the web design weblog
Mezzoblue has written
a comprehensive summary of feeds.
Blogrolls
A
blogroll
is a list, sometimes categorized, of links to webpages the author of a
blog finds worthwhile or interesting. The links in a blogroll are
usually to other blogs with similar interests. The blogroll is often in a
"sidebar" on the page or featured as a dedicated separate web page.
WordPress has a built-in
Link Manager so users do not have to depend on a third party for creating and managing their blogroll.
Syndication
A feed is a machine readable (usually XML) content publication that
is updated regularly. Many weblogs publish a feed (usually RSS, but also
possibly Atom and RDF and so on, as described above). There are tools
out there that call themselves "feedreaders". What they do is they keep
checking specified blogs to see if they have been updated, and when the
blogs are updated, they display the new post, and a link to it, with an
excerpt (or the whole contents) of the post. Each feed contains items
that are published over time. When checking a feed, the feedreader is
actually looking for new items. New items are automatically discovered
and downloaded for you to read, so you don't have to visit all the blogs
you are interested in. All you have to do with these feedreaders is to
add the link to the RSS feed of all the blogs you are interested in. The
feedreader will then inform you when any of the blogs have new posts in
them. Most blogs have these "Syndication" feeds available for the
readers to use.
Managing Comments
One of the most exciting features of blogging tools are the comments.
This highly interactive feature allows users to comment upon article
posts, link to your posts, and comment on and recommend them. These are
known as
trackbacks and
pingbacks. We'll also discuss how
to moderate and manage comments and how to deal with the annoying trend
in "comment spam", when unwanted comments are posted to your blog.
Trackbacks
Trackbacks were originally developed by
SixApart, creators of the
MovableType blog package. SixApart has a good
introduction to trackbacks:
In a nutshell, TrackBack was designed to provide a method of
notification between websites: it is a method of person A saying to
person B, "This is something you may be interested in." To do that,
person A sends a TrackBack ping to person B.
A better explanation is this:
- Person A writes something on their blog.
- Person B wants to comment on Person A's blog, but wants her
own readers to see what she had to say, and be able to comment on her
own blog
- Person B posts on her own blog and sends a trackback to Person A's blog
- Person A's blog receives the trackback, and displays it as a
comment to the original post. This comment contains a link to Person
B's post
The idea here is that more people are introduced to the conversation
(both Person A's and Person B's readers can follow links to the other's
post), and that there is a level of authenticity to the trackback
comments because they originated from another weblog. Unfortunately,
there is no actual verification performed on the incoming trackback, and
indeed they can even be faked.
Most trackbacks send to Person A only a small portion (called an
"excerpt") of what Person B had to say. This is meant to act as a
"teaser", letting Person A (and his readers) see some of what Person B
had to say, and encouraging them all to click over to Person B's site to
read the rest (and possibly comment).
Person B's trackback to Person A's blog generally gets posted
along with all the comments. This means that Person A can edit the
contents of the trackback on his own server, which means that the whole
idea of "authenticity" isn't really solved.
(
Note: Person A can only edit the contents of the trackback on his
own site. He cannot edit the post on Person B's site that sent the
trackback.)
SixApart has published an
official trackback specification.
Pingbacks
Pingbacks were designed to solve some of the problems that people saw with trackbacks. The
official pingback documentation makes pingbacks sound an awful lot like trackbacks:
For example, Yvonne writes an interesting article on her Web log.
Kathleen reads Yvonne's article and comments about it, linking back to
Yvonne's original post. Using pingback, Kathleen's software can
automatically notify Yvonne that her post has been linked to, and
Yvonne's software can then include this information on her site.
There are three significant differences between pingbacks and trackbacks, though.
- Pingbacks and trackbacks use drastically different communication technologies (XML-RPC and HTTP POST, respectively).
- Pingbacks do not send any content.
The best way to think about pingbacks is as
remote comments:
- Person A posts something on his blog.
- Person B posts on her own blog, linking to Person A's post.
This automatically sends a pingback to Person A when both have pingback
enabled blogs.
- Person A's blog receives the pingback, then automatically goes to Person B's post to confirm that the pingback did, in fact, originate there.
The pingback is generally displayed on Person A's blog as simply a
link to Person B's post. In this way, all editorial control over posts
rests exclusively with the individual authors (unlike the trackback
excerpt, which can be edited by the trackback recipient). The automatic
verification process introduces a level of authenticity, making it
harder to fake a pingback.
Some feel that trackbacks are superior because readers of Person
A's blog can at least see some of what Person B has to say, and then
decide if they want to read more (and therefore click over to Person B's
blog). Others feel that pingbacks are superior because they create a
verifiable connection between posts.
Verifying Pingbacks and Trackbacks
Comments on blogs are often criticized as lacking
authority,
since anyone can post anything using any name they like: there's no
verification process to ensure that the person is who they claim to be.
Trackbacks and Pingbacks both aim to provide some verification to blog
commenting.
Comment Moderation
Comment Moderation
is a feature which allows the website owner and author to monitor and
control the comments on the different article posts, and can help in
tackling comment spam. It lets you moderate comments, & you can
delete unwanted comments, approve cool comments and make other decisions
about the comments.
Comment Spam
Comment Spam
refers to useless comments (or trackbacks, or pingbacks) to posts on a
blog. These are often irrelevant to the context value of the post. They
can contain one or more links to other websites or domains. Spammers use
Comment Spam as a medium to get higher page rank for their domains in
Google, so that they can sell those domains at a higher price sometime
in future or to obtain a high ranking in search results for an existing
website.
Spammers are relentless; because there can be substantial money
involved, they work hard at their "job." They even build automated tools
(robots) to rapidly submit their spam to the same or multiple weblogs.
Many webloggers, especially beginners, sometimes feel overwhelmed by
Comment Spam.
There are solutions, though, to avoiding Comment Spam. WordPress includes many tools for combating
Comment Spam. With a little up front effort, Comment Spam can be manageable, and certainly no reason to give up weblogging.
Pretty Permalinks
Permalinks
are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as
categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink is what
another weblogger will use to refer to your article (or section), or how
you might send a link to your story in an e-mail message. Because
others may link to your individual postings, the URL to that article
shouldn't change.
Permalinks are intended to be
permanent (valid for a long time).
"Pretty" Permalinks is the idea that URLs are frequently visible
to the people who click them, and should therefore be crafted in such a
way that they make sense, and not be filled with incomprehensible
parameters. The best Permalinks are "hackable," meaning a user might
modify the link text in their browser to navigate to another section or
listing of the weblog. For example, this is how the default Permalink to
a story might look in a default WordPress installation:
/index.php?p=423
How is a user to know what "p" represents? Where did the number 423 come from?
In contrast, here is a well-structured, "Pretty" Permalink which
could link to the same article, once the installation is configured to
modify permalinks:
/archives/2003/05/23/my-cheese-sandwich/
One can easily guess that the Permalink includes the date of the
posting, and the title, just by looking at the URL. One might also guess
that hacking the URL to be
/archives/2003/05/ would get a list
of all the postings from May of 2003. Pretty (cool). For more
information on possible Permalink patterns in WordPress, see
Using Permalinks.
Blog by email
Some blogging tools offer the ability to
email your posts
directly to your blog, all without direct interaction through the
blogging tool interface. WordPress offers this cool feature. Using
email, you can now send in your post content to a pre-determined email
address & voila! Your post is published!
Post Slugs
If you're using Pretty Permalinks, the
Post Slug
is the title of your article post within the link. The blogging tool
software may simplify or truncate your title into a more appropriate
form for using as a link. A title such as "I'll Make A Wish" might be
truncated to "ill-make-a-wish". In WordPress, you can change the Post
Slug to something else, like "make-a-wish", which sounds better than a
wish made when sick.
Excerpt
Excerpts are condensed summaries of your blog posts, with blogging
tools being able to handle these in various ways. In WordPress, Excerpts
can be specifically written to summarize the post, or generated
automatically by using the first few paragraphs of a post or using the
post up to a specific point, assigned by you.
Plugins
Plugins
are cool bits of programming scripts that add additional functionality
to your blog. These are often features which either enhance already
available features or add them to your site.
WordPress offers simple and easy ways of adding
Plugins to your blog. From the
Administraton Panel, there is a
Plugin Page. Once you have uploaded a Plugin to your WordPress plugin directory, activate it from the
Plugins Management
SubPanel, and sit back and watch your Plugin work. Not all Plugins are
so easily installed, but WordPress Plugin authors and developers make
the process as easy as possible.
Basics-A Few Blogging Tips
Starting a new blog is difficult and this can put many people off.
Some may get off to a good start only to become quickly discouraged
because of the lack of comments or visits. You want to stand out from
this crowd of millions of bloggers, you want to be one of the few
hundred thousand blogs that are actually visited. Here are some simple
tips to help you on your way to blogging mastery:
- Post regularly, but don't post if you have nothing worth posting about.
- Stick with only a few specific genres to talk about.
- Don't put 'subscribe' and 'vote me' links all over the front
page until you have people that like your blog enough to ignore them
(they're usually just in the way).
- Use a clean and simple theme if at all possible.
- Enjoy, blog for fun, comment on other peoples' blogs (as they normally visit back).
- Have fun blogging and remember, there are no rules to what you post on your blog!
