Blog Basics
What Is A Blog?
“Blog” is just a shortened version of “weblog“, a term used to describe web sites that keep an ongoing account of information. Blogging evolved from weblogs, which was a webmaster’s way to post logs to their websites of what content had been updated on their site and what was new. These weblogs grew and also the technology around them evolved and changed to become what blogs are today. A blog is a frequently updated website featuring diary-type commentary and links to articles on other Web sites.
Read this article for more information on the difference between websites and blogs.
Blogs tend to have these basic features available:
- The main page area with articles listed in ongoing order,with the latest displayed first.
- These articles are organized into categories
- Older articles are archived into month/year archives.
- A comments system which allows viewers to leave comments on posts.
- A blogroll which is like a list of links to other related sites.
- RSS Feeds
What is Blog Content
Content is the most important feature for any web site including blogs. Without fresh and constantly updated information there is really no reason at all for a visitor to return to your website.
On a blog we refer to articles as “posts“, so this content is posted to the blogging platform by the author via the online editor in the backend interface of Wordpress. Wordpress has the ability to allow for multiple authors – called guest writers to post articles as well.
What about Blog Comments
If you want an interactive website where readers can leave comments about content, suggest ideas and improvements and critique your work – the blogging platform has all this already built in.
Most blogs have a method to allow visitors to leave comments. There are also clever ways for authors of other blogs to leave comments without even visiting your blog. these are known as “pingbacks” or “trackbacks“, they inform other bloggers whenever they quote a post from another site in their own posts. All this ensures that online conversations can be maintained seamlessly among various site users and blogs.
What is Wordpress?
WordPress is a powerful publishing platform, and it comes with a great set of features designed to make your experience as a publisher on the Internet as easy, pleasant and appealing as possible.
WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on hundreds of thousands of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.
Everything from the documentation to the code itself, was created by and for the community. WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it. (More than most commercial platforms.) It also means you are free to use it for anything from your dogs home page to a Fortune 5 web site without paying anyone a license fee.
WordPress is designed to be installed on your own web server, or shared hosting account, which gives you complete control. Unlike third-party hosted services, you can be sure of being able to access and modify everything related to your blog.
Don’t get confused with wordpress.org and wordpress.com, Wordpress as discussed above is what we refer to when we talk about Wordpress and is available from wordpress.org. There is also a service called WordPress.com which lets you get started with a new and free WordPress-based blog in seconds, but varies in several ways and is less flexible than the WordPress you download and install yourself.
If you’re just starting out, follow our posts as we will show you how to get WordPress set up quickly and effectively, as well as information on performing basic and advanced tasks within WordPress
Blogs are completely different from the traditional web site. Unlike normal static web sites, blogs let you create new pages or posts, extremely easily by simply adding your text and title into a WYSIWYG editor and posting it.
The Wordpress platform through the use of templates automatically adds your post to your blog, creates the new page for you and inserts your new post into the correct category archive. By also using plug ins you are able to do a variety of tasks which are not possible with your traditional web site, for example you can automatically add tags to your posts, social networking buttons which enable readers to bookmark and share your post, add a forum to your blog, all from a interface which is extremely user friendly.
Users can even maintain their blog without being online, you can write numerous articles and set them to be published on certain days at specific times automatically and with the built in technology of the blog platform, feed aggregators are notified immediately when a new post has been added to your blog, without user intervention.
Search engines love blogs because they are a source of fresh content and blogs are regularly updated.
The webmaster can get feedback both positive or negative on posts written on a blog by allowing the use of comments. Comments are a great way of collecting feedback, and allow you to gauge your readers and also get great ideas for new posts or articles. Through the blogging platform you can invite users and authors to submit their articles as well, and the admin panel allows you to easily control their access and privileges.
Blogs and blogging have exploded across the face of the Internet in the past few years, as more and more people discover the ease in which they can present their story, their ideas and thoughts to the world wide web, and with the development of technology such as social networking tools, it has become even more popular.
The blog is a development of technology which people can no longer ignore.
