A blog – or weblog – is a special kind of website, where
the main page consists of short “posts”, arranged with the most recent at the
top. Many major sites feature blogs, sometimes written by teams of people. But
the archetypal blog is composed by an individual – a daily log of a person’s
thoughts, life or online discoveries. Often described as the biggest publishing
revolution since the advent of the World Wide Web itself, blogs have become a
central part of Net culture. And it only takes a few minutes to set up your
own.
If you so desired, you could create and maintain a blog
manually, coding the HTML just as you would a standard webpage and uploading
the pages via FTP. But the beauty of blogging is that you don’t have to do any
of this techie and time-consuming stuff. Creating a blog can be as simple as
signing up with a free provider, logging in to their website, and typing a new
post.
The easy option: sign up with a blog host
There are scores of blog hosts that will let you
set up and update your weblog – the biggest being Blogger,
part of the Google empire. When you sign up, you’ll be asked to create a
username, password and a name for your blog. Next, you’ll need to choose a page
template, which will determine how your blog will look. Many hosts allow you to
create your own design from scratch, though you’ll also be offered a set of
existing templates to choose from. Once all that’s done, the provider will
allocate a unique Web address for your blog and give you access to a webpage
where you can post new entries and edit existing ones. Some blog hosts
evenallow you to add a new post simply by sending an email to a special email
address known only to you: the subject line becomes the article’s title, and the
message body becomes the post. Easy. There are scores of blog hosts out there,
but four are much more widely used than the rest:
Blogger www.blogger.com
LiveJournal www.livejournal.com
TypePad www.typepad.com
Xanga www.xanga.com
All of these – and most of the scores of others – offer a
free service as well as more feature-packed pay-to-use
options. Today, even the free packages supply most of the tools that no serious
blogger can live without: a means for readers to leave comments about
each post; photo posting; automatic archiving of your older
posts, all linked from the homepage; space for a blogroll (a
list of links to your own favourite blogs); and the ability to generate an RSS
newsfeed.
Server-side
blogging
Blog hosts do an excellent job of making it a breeze to
set up a blog and start posting. These days, most also offer a decent set of
tools. However, if you want total control over your blog – and especially if
you want to intergrate a blog into your existing website – then you might want to
investigate server-side
blogging. This way,
instead of managing your blog via the webpage of a blog host, you install
special blogging software on a Web server that you have direct access to.
Usually, this would be a server belonging to a Web host, though it’s also
possible to use your own computer as a Web server. The most popular server-side
systems can be downloaded from:
Greymatter www.noahgrey.com/greysoft
Movable Type www.movabletype.org
Radio Userland www.userland.com
WordPress wordpress.org
Extra tools
There are loads of other blogging tools out there – for
tracking other bloggers linking to you, creating an email subscription option,
adding a virtual community area… the list goes on. For many of the best tools,
follow the links from:
Lights.com www.lights.com/weblogs/tools.html
Before you get stuck in, take a look online at what’s
already out there in the blog universe.
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