Intro to Blogging

citation

“Introduction to Blogging.” WordPress. Ed. Ryan Boren and Matt Mullenweg. 27 Feb. 2007. 28 Feb. 2007.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Introduction_to_Blogging#The_Difference_Between_a_Blog_and_CMS.3F

summary

WordPress gives those new to blogging what a blog is all about, in layman’s terms. This serves as a perfect place to start thinking about blogs because the concepts are fairly basic.

quotes

Generally speaking (though 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.

This ability to organize and present articles in a composed fashion is much of what makes blogging a popular personal publishing tool.

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.

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.

Review/Analysis

This info page, although somewhat biased, provides a great introduction to blogging. It breaks down the confusing, computery parts of the blog that I had a harder time understanding. It explains that content and comments are basically the lifeblood of the blog. Without content, a blog is literally nothing. Comments are what feed bloggers and are part of why blogs are so popular and influential.

Archives seem to be really important to the blogging community, but I still can’t figure out why. To me, they just seem like the names of all your posts in chronological order. But, apparently, this is revolutionary.

Blogrolls provide a way to link your readers to other blogs you enjoy reading or that are related to your topic. Feeds and RSS provide a way for your readers to keep track of when you post new updates, so every time you update, they know. It gives the blogger incentive to post often, because the reader will return often.

Trackbacks are where one bloggers sees another blogger’s post, is interested enough to comment, so he takes the blog and posts a link to it on his own site, where he comments about it. This supposedly increases authenticity because readers can track both blogs. Pingbacks automatically send a pingback to the original blogger, who then goes to the second person’s blog to confirm that the pingback did, in fact, originate at the blogger’s site. *phew* that’s a mouthful.

Permalinks are another one of those things that seem fairly obvious to me, but are important to the blogging community. A permalink is the one where your blog or posts can be found. It’s a “pretty” permalink if it says something like “nickiblog.com/research/blog/intro” because then the user can see what it’s about in the URL, instead of something like “nickiblog.com/indexphp.234552=?”. Nobody knows what that means.

Lastly, the site gives some tips to bloggers just starting off. They recommend a blogger post useful/content-filled blogs often, stick to one topic, don’t put irritating banners or “vote me!” things all over your blog, and, above all, have fun blogging.