Blogging overview

‘Blog’ = ‘web‘ + ‘log‘

A blog is a chronological series of website-based updates/posts, written and organised like a traditional diary, even down to the more informal writing style.

Estimates suggests the first blogs date back to 1994, and ‘weblog’ was first used in 1997.

See Rebecca Blood’s article Weblogs: A History And Perspective.

Not for ‘real’ journalists? Think again …

• The BBC has a Blog Network

• Newspapers have fully embraced blogs – see Daily Telegraph blogs and Times Online blogs

Introduction to WordPress

WordPress launched in 2005

It can be used as a ‘browser based’ system (no technical skills required) or installed on your own server (for experts!)

It boasts a number of features:

• It’s free
• It offers many template options
• It offers tags and categories, meaning that posts are easy to organise and sort
• It provides ‘rich media’ options ie audio, video and images
• It has WYSIWYG editing and spell checking
• It has a great spam fighting add-on
• There is a huge open source support network, meaning that there is a ‘widget’ for virtually anything you want to add to your blog

My verdict: The best and most versatile tool, capable of taking you through your first early steps to the very depths of professional blogging.

Other blogging tools that are available

Blogger: Google’s blogging offering (bought it in 2002), very easy to install and use, but very limited support and add-ons. Great as your first blogging option, but as you get more experienced, you’ll find it very limiting. It’s browser-based so good for people with an aversion to HTML.

My verdict: Great for newbies

There’s some dispute about what the RSS in ‘RSS feeds’ actually stands for – here are the options:

• Really Simple Syndication

• Rich Site Summary

• RDF Site Summary

There are two parts to RSS feeds:

• The feed itself, that is to say the content that you have created on your website or blog.

• The RSS/news aggregator, which pulls these feeds together and brings them together as a single page.

Content can mean audio, video, images or text.

In it’s simplest form, RSS feeds work like this:

• Someone visits your website, loves your content and wants to know when you’ve written new pages.

• They subscribe to the RSS feed on your website

• Every time you produce new content, without you having to do a thing, that person gets an automatic update of that new content

RSS feeds are a great tool to use on your website because:

• It takes the content to the user, rather than them having to go looking for it

• It encourages website loyalty = return customers = more chances for monetization

• It allows you to incorporate your content into cool widgets which use the system

More info via my website

The importance of blogging directories

Blogging directories mean that your blog can be more easily found … without them you’re alone in the search engine wilderness.

Technorati – the biggest and best known, with well over 100 million blogs listed.
Blogged – blogs divided and sorted by topics.
Bloglines – a news aggregator owned by Ask.com.
Blog Catalog – a ‘social blogger community’.
Feedburner – recently taken over by Google, this directory has a strong focus on blogs and advertising.

Practical activity: Creating personal, browser-based WordPress blogging areas

Create a browser-based blog on wordpress.com

Miscellaneous notes:

1) Yes you can import from Blogger to WordPress:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Importing_Content

2) Blidget Pro lets you create a multiple RSS feed at http://www.widgetbox.com/info/products/blidget-pro

Spring widgets will allow you to do this: http://www.springwidgets.com/widgets/view/23

3) Flickr’s free service: you can upload 100MB worth of photos each calendar month. This is a bandwidth limit, and not an amount of space that you have on Flickr servers.

4) mp3 audio player available via http://www.1pixelout.net/code/audio-player-wordpress-plugin/

or in widgetbox.com at http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/mp3

5) The best place to start looking for plugins is http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

What about you? What are your thoughts on this subject?