Blogs
From Mindef0717
Revision as of 11:13, 16 April 2007
A blog is a website in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. Like other media, blogs often focus on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news. Some blogs function as online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog)
Contents |
Blog Terms & Features
Post or Entry
The content of the blog is divided into what is called posts or entries. Some people refer to long posts as articles.
Permalinks
These are the permanent URLs of the particular posts. When you want to reference or link to a particular post on a blog, use the permalink.
Archives
These are where older posts or entries of the blog can be accessed.
Feeds
Sometimes known as RSS feeds, feeds can be read and consolidated by a feed aggregator or feed reader so that you can easily keep track of blogs and other websites that generate feeds.
Comments
Most blogs allow readers to comment on individual posts. The blog owner may choose moderate comments (the comment is not displayed until the blog owner approves the comment), or even turn off commenting completely. Some blogs suffer from comment spam, where unwanted and unrelated comments are posted.
Trackbacks
Trackbacks allow readers of a post to easily access other posts that link to that particular post. This is one of the least understood blogging features, especially for beginners. Some blog engines do not support trackbacks.
Blogroll
A blogroll is just a list of links to other blogs that the blog owner likes.
Blog Search Engines
Blog search engines are different from normal search engines because they only search for blogs and other websites that have feeds.
Technorati (http://technorati.com) Technorati sorts search results by time. The latest blog posts with the search terms appear on top.
Google Blog Search (http://www.google.com/blogsearch)
Blog Engines
If you run your own server
WordPress (http://wordpress.org) WordPress is the most popular free blog engine.
Free Hosted Blogging Services
Blogger (http://www.blogger.com) Probably the most popular free blogging service. Owned by Google. The domain name is blogspot.com.
Wordpress.com (http://wordpress.com) Runs on the WordPress engine. Currently does not allow template customization, but this may be changed in the future.
Blogsome (http://blogsome.com) First free hosted service to run on WordPress. Allows template customization.
Feed Readers
Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com) Popular web-based RSS aggregator.
