What is a Blog?
"Blog" is an abbreviated version of "web-log," which is a term used to describe frequentlyupdated web sites that maintain an ongoing chronicle of information. Blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject such as food, politics,technology, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, andother media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although many contain photographs and audio or video and arepart of a wider network of social media.
Generally speaking (though there are exceptions), blogs tend to have a few things in common:
For a more detailed explanation oneach of these components, please see below.
What are the main components of a Blog?
Content
On a blog, the content consists ofarticles (also sometimes called “posts” or "entries") that theauthor(s) writes. Retail sites feature a catalog of products. University sites contain information about their campuses, curriculum, and faculty. News sites show the latest news stories. For a personal blog, there might be a bunch of observations, or reviews. Without some sort of updated content, there is little reason to visit a web site more than once.
Typically, blog authors compose their articles in a web-based interface, built into the blogging system itself. Some blogging systems also support the ability to use online software, which allows authors to write articles offline and upload them at a later time.
Archives
A blog is also a good way to keep track of articles on a site. A lot of blogs feature an archive based on dates (like a monthly or yearly archive). The front page of a blog may feature a calendar of dates linked to daily archives. Archives can also be based on categories featuring all the articles related to a specific category. This ability to organize and present articles in a composed fashion is much of what makes blogging a popular personal publishing tool.
Blogroll
A blogroll is a list, sometimes categorized, of links to webpages the author of a blog finds worthwhile or interesting. The links in a blogroll are usually to other blogs with similar interests. The blogroll is often in a "sidebar" on the page or featured as a dedicated separate web page.
Comments
A comments section turns static websites into interactive ones. Wouldn't it be nice if the readers of a website could leave comments, tips or impressions about the site or a specific article? With blogs, they can! Posting comments is one of the most exciting features of this technology. Most blogs have a method to allow visitors to leave comments. There are also unique ways for authors of other blogs to leave comments without even visiting the website! Called "pingbacks" or "trackbacks", they can inform other bloggers whenever they cite an article from another site in their own articles. All this ensures that online conversations can be maintained painlessly among various site users and websites.
How do you subscribe to a Blog?
Most blogs offer RSS Feeds for one-click subscription to your default Feed Reader. For more information of RSS Feeds and Feed Readers, please visit the RSS FAQs page.
What do you need to start a Blog?
There are many software platforms available to start a blog. For beginners, Blogger, which is owned by Google, is free and easy to use. This online service provides page templates with drag-and drop editing. For a service with increased features and a more professional appearance at a low monthly price try TypePad. Go Daddy, the domain name registrar also has inexpensive Blogservices. Both services allow you to use your own domain name (www.yourname.com) if you have one. For the more technically adept users, a powerful publishing platform and one of the gold standards for professional Bloggers, is WordPress. They offer a free ad-supported site, however to really take advantage of the features and to use your own domain name, you need to run the software on a web server or shared hosting account. To learn more about hosting and domain names,please see the Hosting FAQs page.
What are Trackbacks?
TrackBacks were designed to provide amethod of notification between websites.
The following shows an example:
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.
Most trackbacks send to Person A only a small portion (called an "excerpt") of what Person B had to say. This is meant to act as a "teaser", letting Person A (and the readers) see some of what Person B had to say, and encouraging them all to clickover to Person B's site to read the rest (and possibly comment).
Person B's trackback to Person A's blog generally gets posted along with all the comments. This means that Person A can edit the contents of the trackback on his own server, which means that the whole idea of "authenticity" isn't really solved. (Note: Person A can only edit the contents of the trackback on his own site. He cannot edit the post on Person B's site that sent the trackback.)
A more specific description and official documentation on the official trackback specification can be foundhere. (http://www.movabletype.org/docs/mttrackback.html).
What are Pingbacks?
Pingbacks were designed to solve someof the problems that people saw with trackbacks.
For example, Alice writes an interesting article on her Web log. Bob reads Alice's article and comments about it, linking back to Alice's original post. Using pingback, Bob's software can automatically notify Alice that her post has been linked to, and Alice's software can then include this information on her site.
There are three significantdifferences between pingbacks and trackbacks.
The best way to think about pingbacks is as remote comments:
Person A posts something on his blog.
Person B posts on her own blog,linking to Person A's post. This automatically sends a pingback to Person A when both have pingback enabled blogs.
Person A's Blog receives the pingback, then automatically goes to Person B's post to confirm that the pingback did, in fact, originate there.
Some feel that trackbacks are superior because readers of Person A's blog can at least see some of what Person B has to say, and then decide if they want to read more (and therefore click over to Person B's blog). Others feel that pingbacks are superior becausethey create a verifiable connection between posts.
What is Comment Moderation?
Comment moderation is a feature in some blogging platforms which allows the website owner and author to monitor and control the comments on the different article posts, and can help in tackling comment spam. It lets you moderate comments, and you can delete unwanted comments, approve cool comments, and make other decisions about the comments.
What is a Permalink?
Most permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to refer toyour article (or section), or how you might send a link to your story in an e-mail message. Because others may link to your individual postings, the URL to that article shouldn't change. Permalinks are intended to be permanent (valid for a long time).
"Pretty" Permalinks is the idea that URLs are frequently visible to the people who click them, and should therefore be crafted in such a way that they make sense, and not be filled with incomprehensible parameters. The best Permalinks are "hackable" meaning a user might modify the link text in their browser to navigate to another section or listing of the weblog. For example, this is how the defaultPermalink to a story might look in a default WordPress installation:
/index.php?p=423
How is a user to know what "p" represents? Where did the number 423 come from?
In contrast, here is a well-structured, "Pretty" Permalink that could link to the same article, once the installation is configured to modify permalinks:
/archives/2003/05/23/my-cheese-sandwich/
One can easily guess that the Permalink includes the date of the posting, and the title, just by looking atthe URL. One might also guess that hacking the URL to be /archives/2003/05/would get a list of all the postings from May of 2003.