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
