An Introduction to Weblogs
From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection
This wikibook is designed for use by candidates studying for Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) Unit No. DN8111: Weblogs. The unit specification can be downloaded from the SQA web site.
The unit is designed to enable candidates to locate, use and create weblogs (“blogs”) and provide candidates with an opportunity to explore the applications of blogs, create blogs and track blogs using aggregation tools.
Contents
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[edit] Locating and reviewing weblogs
[edit] Historical development of weblogs
[edit] Introduction
A weblog can be loosely defined as a journal or diary which is published on the World Wide Web. The process of updating and maintaining a weblog is known as blogging and the author is known as a blogger. Weblogs are usually updated at regular intervals using user-friendly software that requires little or no technical background.
The rate of growth of blogging has been astounding. According toTechnorati there are currently (early 2006) there are now over 26 million weblogs in existence. They reckon that:
- The blogosphere (ie: the weblog universe) doubles in size about every 5.5 months.
- A new weblog is created roughly every second and there are over 80,000 weblogs created daily.
- About 55% of all weblogs are active.
- About 13% of all weblogs are updated at least weekly.
ACTIVITY 1.1
Technorati carries out a major survey of weblog activities every six months. Check their website for the current values.
It is difficult to come up with a definition that fits all weblogs, or even most weblogs. In essence, weblogs are web pages that have several posts or distinct items of information per page. They are normally in reverse chronological order, with the most recent post at the top of the page and the oldest at the bottom.
Weblogs often contain links to other Web sites or weblogs. Many of the earliest weblogs relied heavily on links, and consisted mainly of short pieces of text, mixed with news items or useful links the author had found that day. Modern weblogs may link to external sites, but they might also have more of an inward focus, acting as a personal journal or diary for the author. Weblogs are often created and maintained by an individual, but they may also be produced by small groups of people, or involve large communities in a single weblog.
Most weblogs are non-commercial in nature, but they are increasingly being added to commercial sites and being used new form of business communication. A weblog can be a small part of a larger site, a small portion of a single page or an entire Web site. Weblogs are usually updated oftener than traditional Web sites, due largely to the smaller changes and lower amount of effort required to add a new weblog post as compared to adding an entire Web page full of content.
Weblogs are based on discrete posts, sometimes known as articles or entries. Each page is usually a collection of posts over a period of time, sometimes several years. Tools are available to automate the creation of new posts, leaving the details of creating archive pages, uploading amended files to a server and applying HTML templates to automated scripts. Bloggers can add new posts using a simplified interface that operates like a word processing application.
Weblogs are a rapidly-developing area, so it is likely that the information given below will become outdated very quickly. The following links are good sources of current information: http://weblogs.about.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weblog
A good primer on weblogs can be found at: http://www.dvorak.org/blog/primer/blogprimer1.htm
A short history of blogs can be found at: http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html
Further information can be found at: http://simonworld.mu.nu/archives/037779.php and also at: http://www.streamlinewebco.com/blog/_archives/2004/3/23/28903.html
ACTIVITY 1.2
Follow some of the links given above and read what they have to say about weblogs.
[edit] History of Blogs
It is difficult to specify exactly when the first weblogs appeared, as they weren’t defined until much later. No single person was responsible for their invention and they appeared spontaneously on several sites about the same time. The earliest weblogs were simply lists of links and personal filters of billions of pages that were swamping the World Wide Web, but they’ve since become personal journals or diaries, with much more opinion and editorial content.
Pages going back to the earliest days of the Web share many characteristics of weblogs and can be regarded as their predecessors or forerunners. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, used his own website on the first-ever Web server to keep his colleagues at CERN, the European Nuclear Research Centre, informed about other Web pages and servers within the organisation. The diary and journal formats which appeared soon after the Web's expansion outwith the research community bore some resemblance to the weblog format. They were updated at regular intervals and shared tales from the author's life.
One of the earliest forerunners the weblog was Justin Hall's Links from the Underground website which the author used to share links to interesting sites and tell stories of his life and travels, beginning in 1994. The site continued to be updated until mid-2005, when the author decided to take a well-earned rest. Another weblog predecessor was Michael Sippey’s website The Filter, a section of a larger site (http://www.theobvious.com), which shared links about technology news. The Filter was updated daily as early as 1996 and was used to publish essays and articles complementing the main part of the site.
The What's New page, seen on thousands of Web sites, has much in common with the weblog format. One of the earliest What's New pages appeared in 1993 at the National Center for Supercomputing (NCSA), producers of the first graphical Web browser, Mosaic. The NCSA/Mosaic What's New page served as a central point for information about new servers, sites and pages coming online.
Around 1997, a few web authors began publishing short bits of text each day without giving this activity a name. For example, Dave Winer of UserLand Software, started publishing essays on technology issues on his website in 1994. In April 1997 he started a new site (http://www.scripting.com) which kept track of Web sites devoted to programming and scripting and gave daily updates about his company's software. The site was still being maintained in late 2005, but now he adds a personal commentary to each day's postings.
Also in 1997, Jorn Barger began compiling a list of links with short descriptions on a regular basis. His site initially consisted of a list of 20 to 30 links, with single sentence descriptions, added at a rate of 5 to 10 a day. He later started writing an online diary to complement the links. Barger coined the term weblog to describe his site, and over the next year or two, the term was adopted by other authors.
Jesse James Garrett, editor of Infosift (http://www.jgg.net/infosift) began compiling a list of similar sites as he encountered them his travels around the Web. In November 1977, he sent that list to Cameron Barrett, who published it on list on CamWorld (http://www.camworld.com), and others maintaining similar sites began sending him their details for inclusion on the list. Garrett’s "page of only weblogs" listed the 23 weblogs known to exist at the start of 1999.
All the earliest weblogs followed a similar format, giving short pieces of text on a single, rapidly changing page which provided links to interesting sites the author had found. The notion of creating a website purely to direct visitors to other Web sites was a novel idea at the time, as the prevailing wisdom was that commercial Web sites had to be "sticky" in order to keep visitors within the site for as long as possible. In contrast, the early weblogs were eager to provide visitors with links to other sites, rather than confining them to a single site.
It was easy to read all of the weblogs on Garrett’s list, and many people did. However, as more and more people began publishing their own weblogs it became difficult to read every weblog every day, or even to keep track of all the new ones that were appearing. In early 1999, Brigitte Eaton compiled a list of every weblog she knew about and created the Eatonweb Portal. She evaluated all submissions by a simple criterion: the site consist of dated entries. This rapidly became part of the definition of weblogs.
1999 also marked the beginning of the “weblog explosion” when tools to enable anyone to create a weblog were initially released. Prior to this, weblog creators had to write their own software and code each day's postings by hand, using HyperText Markup Language (HTML), so people producing weblogs up until 1999 were generally Internet technology professionals or programmers.
July 1999, saw the release of Pitas , the first tool designed for creating, managing and maintaining weblogs. Pitas, which is still in operation today, enables users to sign up for an account and create a weblog, which is hosted for free with an address of the form: http://username.pitas.com. A Pitas weblog has several automated components, including features to let users customise their sites. There is a user-friendly posting page where users can add the title, URL and description of each post.
Pitas weblog authors don’t need to know HTML because the software automates the creation of links. However, templates allow knowledgeable users to change the HTML behind the visual design of their site without affecting the automatic elements of each post. Automatic archiving is an important feature of Pitas. As users post regular updates to their sites the software automatically moves older entries to the archive pages.
In August 1999, Pyra Labs released the first version of Blogger, which is also still online at http://www.blogger.com, although it is now owned by Google. Blogger provides similar features to Pitas, but with a number of important differences. Blogger initially required users to have their own Web site. It could take user posts, create static files and transmit the amended files to the users’ server when they updated.
The tasks of programming, maintaining and archiving information were handled by Blogger on a central server accessible from anywhere, leaving users to host output on their own sites. Blogger also offered the ability to maintain more than one weblog from a single account and provided additional ways to customise sites, eg: templates could be customised by using a series of special tags, and an archive template allowed users to specify how older posts should appear.
1999 also saw the release of LiveJournal, which actually came out a few months before Pitas and Blogger, but wasn't regarded as a weblog tool until much later. The tools available through Pitas and Blogger led to a massive explosion in the number of people maintaining weblogs. The number of weblog authors grew from dozens to hundreds and then thousands within months of these tools being released. Weblogs were filled with original writing, journals of author's lives and links to interesting sites, including other weblogs.
Additional tools followed, eg: UserLand Software released Manila, a content management system which incorporated weblogs and an integrated discussion system. A public server at http://www.editthispage.com allowed prospective users to try out the software without buying the server. Other tools released that year included Velocinews and Groksoup which also automated weblog posting and offered free hosting for weblogs. All of these services were free and all of them were designed to enable individuals to publish their own weblogs quickly and easily.
The original weblogs were link-driven sites containing a mixture of links, commentary and personal opinions. Their editors presented links to obscure websites and to current news articles they felt were worthy of note. These links were usually accompanied by an editorial commentary, often with an irreverent or sarcastic tone. The format of the typical weblog, providing only a very short space in which to write an entry, encourages brevity on the part of the writer. Longer commentary is often published elsewhere. These weblogs provided a valuable filtering function for their readers by pre-surfing the web for them.
In 2000, second-generation weblog tools began to appear. Greymatter a weblog management system designed to be installed on your own server, provided dozens of features which were not available in existing weblog tools. Since the software was installed on your own server, there were none of the traffic problems a large, central service such as Blogger sometimes suffered from.
Since 2001, the explosion in weblog growth and popularity has continued. Stories about weblogs have featured in national magazines, and weblogs have supplemented traditional media coverage in some cases. Notable examples include the South Asian Tsunami, the invasion of Iraq and the US Presidential Election.
Weblog tools have continued to develop with the release of packages such as MovableType and Radio, as well as dozens of more specialised tools. Articles about weblogs continue to appear in the mainstream press, and the registered users at popular services, such as Blogger and LiveJournal, are now numbered in millions. Weblogs are appearing on business and media sites, and they are being used increasingly by grassroots organisations as a way of bringing their causes to the attention of the public.
ACTIVITY 1.3
Follow some of the links given above and read what they have to say about weblogs.
[edit] Blogs and social software
According to [1] Wikipedia:
“Social software is a broad term used to describe software-based tools that facilitate interaction and collaboration. Social software connects people together intellectually and makes it possible to share and evolve ideas. Social software is not bound just by what features the tool provides, but also by social conventions and etiquette on how to use it appropriately. Such software includes email, Usenet, IRC, instant messaging, blogs, wikis, NNTP, folksonomy, and virtual online communities.”
Useful summaries of the different kinds of social software can be found at:
http://www.communitytechnology.org/products/groupware.html and
http://ideant.typepad.com/ideant/files/mejias_ITI2004_paper.pdf
Wikipedia also notes that “Blogs mean many things to different people: ranging from “online journal” to “easily updated personal website”. While these definitions are not wrong, they fail to capture the power of blogs as social software. Beyond being a simple homepage, or an online diary, some blogs also allow comments on the entries thereby a discussion forum, have blogrolls, ie: links to other blogs which the owner reads, and/or have trackback which allows one blog to notify another blog, creating an inter-blog conversation. You can find more information about trackback at http://www.movabletype.org/trackback/beginners/.
One of the most critical features of blogs is that they allow communication on a many-to-many basis, rather than simply one-to-one or one-to-many, as permitted by other types of software. Blogs engage readers and build a virtual community around a particular person or interest, eg: Slashdot (http://slashdot.org/) LiveJournal (http://www.livejournal.com/) and BlogSpot (http://www.blogspot.com).
Social software is fundamental to some of the latest developments on the World Wide Web, sometimes referred to collectively as Web 2.0 (see http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html).
Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org) is a good starting point for obtaining further information about social software. Some of the main types of social software are listed below.
E-mail will already be familiar to most people. However it can be regarded as one of the earliest forms of social software, particularly with regard to some of its one-to-many communication features, such as the use of the cc: field and mailing lists, as well as the use of contact lists or address books.
Instant Messaging (IM) allows individuals to communicate privately with one another over a public network. Popular clients include MSN Messenger (http://messenger.msn.com/Xp/Default.aspx) and Yahoo Messenger (http://messenger.yahoo.com/) IM communications were initially text based but they have now been expanded to include audio and video and clients can also exchange files.
Chat is an abbreviated name for Internet Relay Chat (IRC) which lets users join chat rooms and communicate with many people simultaneously. Users can join an existing chat room or create one of their own, on any topic of interest to them. Once in a chat room they can post comments and respond to the comments of others and invite other users to participate in private chats. You can find out anything you want to know about IRC at http://www.irchelp.org/. Popular suppliers include Yahoo. (http://chat.yahoo.com/)
Newsgroups or forums are the Internet version of electronic bulletin boards, popular among computer users long before Internet. A user can post comments on a topic and other users can respond. Messages are visible to all members of the group and some services provide extensions such as file storage and calendaring. The original newsgroup service, Usenet, is now available via Google Groups (http://groups.google.co.uk/). Other services include Smartgroups (http://www.smartgroups.com/) and Yahoo Groups (http://groups.yahoo.com/).
A Wiki is a group of Web pages that allows users to add their own content and permits others to edit the content. It provides a simple method of producing HML content and is an effective medium for collaboration. The term is also used to describe the collaborative software, sometimes known as a wiki engine, used to create such a website. Examples include: Wikipedia (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki), Wikibooks (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page), Wikinews (http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page) and WikiWikiWeb (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki).
Social network services allow people to meet on-line around shared interests or causes. In some cases it is only possible to join a social network by being recommended by an existing member. Examples include Orkut (http://www.orkut.com), MeetUp (http://www.meetup.com), LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com) and Tribe Networks (http://www.tribe.net). An offshoot of this area is social network search engines, which allow people to find each other according to their XFN social relationships, eg: XHTML Friends Network (http://gmpg.org/xfn/).
Social guides recommend places to visit in the real world such as coffee shops, restaurants and WiFi hotspots, etc. Popular applications include CafeSpot (http://cafespot.net), Tagzania (http://www.tagzania.com/) and WikiTravel (http://wikitravel.org/en/Main_Page).
Social bookmarking sites allow users to post their list of bookmarks or favourite websites for others to search and view. The object is for people to meet others with whom they share a common interest. Examples include Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/), Furl (http://www.furl.net/) and Connectedy (http://www.connectedy.com/).
Social Shopping applications allow group members to make recommendations and give product reviews, eg: SwagRoll (http://swagroll.com/).
Virtual Worlds and Massively-Multiplayer On-line Games (MMOGs) are places where it is possible to interact with other people in a virtual world. Popular commercial worlds include Second Life (http://secondlife.com/), ActiveWorlds (http://www.activeworlds.com/), There (http://www.there.com/index.html), and The Sims Online (http://www.ea.com/official/thesims/thesimsonline/us/nai/index.jsp).
Commercial MMOGs include Everquest (http://eqplayers.station.sony.com/index.vm) and World of Warcraft (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/lowbw.html).
Non-commercial projects include Planeshift (http://www.planeshift.it/) and Solipsis (http://solipsis.netofpeers.net/wiki2/index.php/Main_Page).
Folksonomy is the name given to the informal classifications (sometimes called tags or keywords) that Internet users invent to categorise the objects with which they interact on-line. Social software makes these classifications available to other Internet users, so folksonomy can be viewed as a distributed classification system. Examples of folksonomy-enabled social software include Furl , Flickr and Del.icio.us.
ACTIVITY 1.4
Choose two types of social software which sound particularly interesting to you and follow the links given above to find out more about them, or sign up for them.
[edit] Social conventions and etiquette
Social conventions and etiquette play an important role in weblogs, as in other forms of online communication. The following observations are summarised from a number of online sources:
- Avoid hotlinking: Hotlinking is the practice of linking directly to an image on someone else’s website or blog. Most website owners disapprove of this practice – they would much rather see a link to their homepage.
- Always credit your sources: if you quote or refer to an article or website, credit the original author appropriately.
- Always check the validity of your information: just because information appears on a website doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true. You should always check your facts against several authoritative sources, especially if they are likely to be contentious.
- Correct your mistakes and post updates: you’ll inevitably make mistakes at some point when posting to your weblog. The best practice is to own up to these and correct them.
- Never leave spam comments: if you are commenting on someone else’s weblog, make sure that your comments are meaningful and relevant. A simple statement like “visit my weblog” without any additional relevant content may be regarded as spam by some people. You should also ensure that you delete any spam comments made on your own weblog.
- Remember your audience: anything you post potentially has a worldwide audience and could be there for a long time. Even if you delete something there are always archives and caches, so make sure you really want to say something before going public with it.
- Use good English: you don’t need to write perfect prose, but you should write clear and simple grammatically-correct English and avoid the use of non-standard abbreviations. Remember that WRITING IN CAPITALS is regarded by many as the online equivalent of shouting.
- Always respect copyright: Never quote large extracts from any source without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. Quoting of small excerpts for the purposes of review or criticism is normally acceptable, but the sources should always be acknowledged, as noted earlier.
- Identify yourself: if you leave comments on someone else's weblog, you should identify yourself properly, giving your email address whenever possible. If you don’t want to have a comment attributed to you, you should think again about whether you really want to make it.
- Allow your readers to contact you: it is good practice to provide a way fro your readers to contact you, eg: via email or by leaving comments.
Rebecca Blood devotes a whole chapter to etiquette and ethics in The Weblog Handbook: Practical advice on creating and maintaining your blog. (Perseus Publishing, 2002). These can be summarised as follows:
- Personal attacks: never attack another blogger online. This will only reduce your own credibility, and can lead to problems which will never be resolved.
- Responding to attacks: if someone makes an attack on you, you should simply ignore it. Any time you spend on defending yourself reduces the time you have available for writing new material.
- Asking for a link: don't ask other bloggers to link to your site. If they want to want to direct their readers to your weblog, they’ll do so without being asked.
- Complaining about traffic: don't complain about how few (or how many) hits your weblog is receiving. The more you complain, the less appealing you will appear to your readers.
- Crediting links: always give proper credit when linking to others' websites or weblogs or when passing on links found on someone else's website.
- Announcing your schedule: if you won’t be able to update your weblog for some time, let your readers know when you plan to make the next update so they don't waste their time checking it when nothing is happening.
- Giving warnings: always warn readers clearly if the content of a link might be something they might not approve of or may not want to see.
- Answering e-mails: answer as many e-mails from your readers as you can, but don't let the time spent doing this affect the development of your weblog.
- Publishing facts: only claim that something is a fact if you know it to be true and can prove that this is the case.
- Linking to sources: if you quote material from online sources, give links to the original sources.
- Correcting mistakes: if you feel that you need to correct mistakes in an entry, let your readers know. If possible, leave the original entry intact and make corrections by adding additional information. Try to avoid rewriting or deleting posts, since others may rely on them via links. If this is to operate successfully your original material must remain unchanged.
- Disclosing conflicts of interest: if you have any conflicts of interest, eg: if you’re likely to benefit financially or in some other way from information you are posting, then be open about this.
- Questionable sources: if you think a source is questionable or obviously biased, let your readers know before giving them a link to it, so they will be prepared to interpret it cautiously.
[edit] Links between blogs
Links are an important element of blogs and they play a major role in the development of virtual communities. Links can direct the reader to another weblog or web site. Many weblogs include an “interesting links” section, usually giving links which relate to the theme of the weblog. Others provide lists of “friends’ weblogs”. These can be a useful way of discovering new sites which might be of interest to you.
If you read an interesting post in another weblog and you decide to discuss the same topic in your own weblog, it’s a good idea to add a link to the original post that inspired you. When the administrator of the original weblog checks her access statistics she will find out how many visitors have reached her site through the link you’ve provided, and she’ll probably want to take a look at your weblog. If she likes it, she’ll probably put a link into her weblog, encouraging her readers to visit your site. Another way of encouraging visitors to your weblog is to put your URL in any comments that you write in other weblogs, although a comment consisting only of your URL is unlikely to be welcomed.
These kinds of links create informal communities. Some of these last for a long time while others disappear rapidly, just as in real life. Links are covered in greater detail elsewhere in this wikibook.
[edit] Weblog providers
There are many different providers of blogs, both free and commercial. There are some common factors which link all of the providers, but special features and facilities distinguish between them. There is a useful list of free blog providers at: http://weblogs.about.com/od/weblogsoftwareandhosts/a/topfreeblogs.htm
This includes the following providers, amongst others: WordPress, Blogger and Moveable Type .
There are also a number of reasonably-priced commercial services, eg: Blog Identity and Silkblogs .
Most available weblog software can be divided into two categories, hosted software and independent software. Hosted software resides on the server of the software provider and is normally accessed via a web interface. Independent software needs to be downloaded from the software provider and installed on your own Web server. There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach.
Whether you use hosted software or independent software, blogs may be hosted by the software provider, or hosted on your own web site. Again, there are advantages and disadvantages to each approach.
Almost all weblog software stores your posts in a database, which controls how the content is displayed and provides functions such as searching and archiving. A weblog’s appearance and layout are normally determined by templates containing information about layout and formatting. Whichever blog software package you choose, there are a few features you may want to look for:
- Comments: most blogging software allows readers to comment on posts. Comments are normally time-stamped and identified by the author’s name and possibly a link to their weblog. Some weblog software supports the use of threaded comments, allowing readers can comment on other comments. Unfortunately, comments often contain spam and they may consist simply of a link to another web page. Some blogging software allows blog owners to review comments before they are posted.
- Categories: some software allows a blogger to allocate posts to one or more categories, helping readers to find posts on related topics.
- Pings: A method used to notify web tracking sites that you have made a new post to your blog. The tracking sit will include your post in its index and hopefully attract traffic.
- RSS/Atom feeds: These are two types of blog syndication. Many readers use RSS or Atom based news aggregators to pull in posts and read them, rather than visiting numerous weblogs every day. This can be a useful feature if you want to update your site with content fed by blogs.
- Blogroll: A list of the blogs read by the blogger whose site you are visiting. Lists may also be kept to recommend books, movies or music.
- Moblogging: Short for mobile blogging. Many blog services allow you to post from a mobile phone, PDA or anything else that lets you send e-mails.
- Post scheduling: Some blog software allows you schedule posts for publication at some time in the future. This can be useful if you are away on a business trip or a holiday.
You can find a chart comparing the functions offered by various blogging tools at: http://www.ojr.org/ojr/images/blog_software_comparison.cfm and another one at: http://asymptomatic.net/blogbreakdown.htm
[edit] Blogging tools
Blogger is a free, hosted blogging tool. It was one of the first blogging tools to appear and now has millions of users. Blogger is free of charge and despite being simple to use provides a wide range of features. Unfortunately, it lacks the ability to categorise posts and you need to know HTML and Cascading Style Sheets to make custom changes to the templates provided.
Blogger allows you to FTP the files it has generated to your own Web site. This means that your readers may never realise that you are using Blogger and allows you to publicise your own domain name, rather than using a Blogger URL. Blogger is ideal if you want to set up a simple weblog quickly and cheaply, and it offers an amazing range of features, and professional-looking CSS templates (you can even make your own or customize one), for a free service. You can find full details of how to use Blogger to set up your own weblog later in this Wikibook.
Blogger is closely integrated with the Audioblogger service. You can post audio recordings on your blog simply by calling the Audioblogger number and recording your message.
TypePad is a hosted blogging service provided by Six Apart, who also provide Movable Type (see below). It is a paid service, with the pricing scheme and features divided into three levels: Basic, Plus, and Pro. Higher levels provide greater degrees of customisation.
TypePad has a novel feature called TypeLists that lets you build lists, associating each item with a URL. These lists can be added to the left- or right-hand column of your blog without touching the templates. They can be used to add your current reading or listening list, links to other blogs or links to new posts.
TypePad is a good choice for users who want to get started quickly but still want all the functions. TypePad Plus and Pro are good for configuring layout options without having to go into the templates.
WordPress is another hosted blogging service which is ideal for bloggers who have a limited budget but want full weblog functions. Comments can be moderated by the blog owner before they are published and you can filter comments containing certain words or more than a certain number of links.
Movable Type, created by Six Apart (see TypePad above) one of the best known independent blogging tools. It has every feature a blogger could want and continues to add more, often via the use of plug-ins. It is often regarded as a “bloggers blog”. Unfortunately, you need to rebuild the blog every time you make a change to a template, a configuration setting, or add a new category.
A free version of the software is available to download, but installation is fairly difficult unless you are already familiar with uploading and downloading files to a Web server.
ACTIVITY 1.5
Choose one or two of the sites above which sound particularly interesting to you and follow the links given above to find out more about them, or sign up for them. (Don’t bother with Blogger, as we’ll be looking at it in detail shortly.)
[edit] Using search tools to locate specific blogs
There are about 50,000 new blogs created every day, so it shouldn't be too hard to find one.
In addition to the normal World Wide Web search facilities, there are a number of specialised search engines which search only for weblogs. One of the biggest is Waypath. Another specialised search engine can be found at http://portal.eatonweb.com/. There’s a long list of blog search engines at http://deepblog.com/index.html, another one at http://www.aripaparo.com/archive/000632.html and yet another at http://www.faganfinder.com/blogs/
Google's regular search usually doesn't locate any but the most popular blogs, but Altavista usually does. However, Google also offers a specialised blog search engine: Google Blog Search
About.com suggests that blogs can be divided up into the following categories and gives examples of each: “personal blogs, art blogs, political blogs, news and current events blogs, hobby blogs, technology and computer blogs, photo blogs, sports blogs, travel blogs, commentary blogs, business or professional blogs, education blogs” .
Britblog lists fifteen different categories of weblogs.
For the purposes of this course, you should be able to locate a variety of different types of weblog, including:
- personal journal: an individual diary, usually recounting someone’s everyday life and their thoughts about what’s going on around them. You can find an extensive list of personal journals (more than 7000 of them) at http://www.diarist.net/registry/
- community weblog: a weblog reflecting the activities of a group of people acting in a common purpose. You can find a short directory of UK-based community weblogs at: http://www.britblog.com/directory/category/community.html
- corporate weblog: a weblog produced by a company to market their products or activities. This category includes “flogs” (fake blogs) which look as if they are produced by an individual, but are actually produced by a company for marketing purposes. One company which has made a major move into corporate blogging is Macromedia, now taken over by Adobe. You can read about what they’ve been doing at: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,52380-1.html?tw=wn_story_page_next1 and you can find further comment, and links to the blogs themselves at: http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/logged_in/ekrimen_blogs.html
- political weblog: weblogs produced by political parties, political commentators or other political entities. Political weblogs played a significant role in the US Presidential elections in 2004 and the Iraqi elections in 2005. This trend is likely to continue. Joe Trippi’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything” (Regan Books, 2005) gives a fascinating account of the use of the weblogs and the Internet during one US presidential candidate's campaign. You can find a good list of UK political blogs at: http://www.voidstar.com/ukpoliblog/index.php?cid=6
- special interest weblog: this could cover almost anything not included in the above categories, eg: weblogs relating to a particular sport or hobby. Many of the categories listed by Britblog could be regarded as special interest blogs, eg: humour, travel, design and photography.
These categories of weblogs are not exclusive, for example a blog produced by a Member of Parliament could be categorised as a political blog, a personal journal or perhaps even a special interest weblog.
ACTIVITY 1.6
Visit one of the indexing sites in each of the categories mentioned above and have a look at some of the blogs listed there.
[edit] The characteristics of high quality blogs
High-quality blogs share a number of common features, the most important ones being usability, navigation, structure, connectedness and presentation.
[edit] Usability
Usability covers areas like ease of navigation, ease of finding information, visual appeal and ability to recover from errors. Weblogs are a basically a type of website, so the normal website usability guidelines therefore apply to them. You can find links to a number of usability guidelines at: http://www.nngroup.com/reports/. However, weblogs have their own specific characteristics and usability problems. Weblogs generally require fewer design decisions than other websites, you simply write a page and click on a button to post it. This ease of use has lead to enormous growth in the number of people publishing weblogs.
Most weblogs consist largely of short postings and rely heavily on links. If you find something interesting on another site, you can simply provide a link to it, possibly with the addition of a short commentary. This is much simpler than producing a conventional website. The Blogosphere acts as a positive feedback loop. Good postings are promoted by means of links to other sites, meaning that a larger audience gets to see them and promote them further. As a result there are disproportionately more links to good postings than to bad postings. Some weblogs are simply private diaries, produced for a small group of readers composed largely of relatives or close friends. Usability isn’t a major issue as the readers have a high degree of motivation and prior knowledge. However, if you want to reach a broader audience, usability becomes much more important.
Usability guru Jakob Neilsen has produced Usability 101: Introduction to Usability and a list of 10 major usability problems which are summarised below:
1. No author biographies
Anonymous weblogs lack credibility. Readers like to know something about the author, eg: qualifications and experience in the area under discussion.
2. No author photo
A photo lets readers know that you’re not trying to hide. Readers relate better to someone they can visualise. Readers whom you’ve met before will recognise your photo, and anyone you happen to meet in future will recognise you from it.
3. Nondescript posting titles
Readers should be able to determine the topic of a posting by reading its headline. Readers using search engines or newsfeeds (RSS/Atom) will often see only the headline and will use it to decide whether or not to read the full posting.
4. Links don't say where they go
You should tell readers what they'll find at the other end of the link by providing the relevant information in the anchor text itself or the surrounding words.
5. Classic hits are buried If you write any postings with lasting value don't relegate them to the archives, where people can only find something if they know when you posted it. Highlight such postings in your navigation system and link directly to them.
6. The calendar is the only navigation
Don’t let the timeline be the only way of navigating your weblog. Most weblog software lets you categorise postings so readers can easily get a list of all postings on a certain topic.
7. Irregular publishing frequency
Your readers must be able to anticipate how often updates will occur. You should pick a publication schedule and stick to it. Daily updates are best, but weekly or even monthly updates can also work.
8. Mixing topics
If your weblog covers too many different topics, you're unlikely to attract a loyal audience. Readers might visit a weblog to read a posting about a topic that interests them but they're unlikely to return if their target topic only appears occasionally among a range of postings on other topics.
9. Forgetting that you write for your future boss
Every time you post anything to the Internet, think how it will look to a prospective employer in ten years time. Once something is published it can be archived, cached or indexed in places you might never think of.
10. Having a domain name owned by a weblog service
Having a weblog address ending in blogspot.com, typepad.com, etc. will soon be the equivalent of having a hotmail.com email address or a Geocities website. You’ll be seen as a naïve beginner who shouldn't be taken too seriously. It’s easy, quick and cheap start a new weblog on one of the services that offer free accounts, but it only costs a few pounds per year to get your personal domain name. If you're serious about blogging, move your weblog away from a domain name that's controlled by somebody else.
[edit] Navigation
Navigation includes timeline navigation, search facilities, backtracking and threading. Weblogs can be great sources of expert information on a range of topics, but they are useless if you can’t find the information you are looking for. Weblogs can be organised in several different ways and these can influence how readers find information on your site.
Timeline navigation
Most weblogs are organized primarily by the date of postings, with the newest posts appearing on the main page and older posts being stored in the archives. Unfortunately, if someone is looking for specific information, digging into the archives based on date offers little help. The major limitation of date-based archives is that they aren't very descriptive. There isn't much you can do other than look at each month's posts until you find the right one. Date-based archives that operate by week or by single day (often via a calendar interface) are even less useful because they require readers to click through more pages to find what they want.
However, a few things can be done to make date-based archives a little more usable. Some weblog providers let you set titles or subjects for posts. You can post titles next to each archive page (if done on a single day or post basis), or let you show a string of titles below each month's archive link. An archive page listing the titles of posts provides more information than listing archived weblog postings by date alone.
Try to avoid moving your archives from one location to another. If you move your archives from http://myblog.com/old/ to http://myblog.com/archives/ then anyone who has set up a link to a specific post will lose it and any search engine that has indexed your site will point users to errors instead of the indexed posts.If you change your URL completely, or move from one server to another, examine ways of redirecting requests for the old files so that readers using search engines can still find your information in the new location.
Categorisation
Categories are another form of organisation offered by many weblog providers that can help readers to find information about a specific topic. Categorised weblogs usually group posts into several categories, creating specific archive pages for each category. The more categories blogger creates to organize a site, the more specific the categories become.
Some providers offer multiple categorisations, so each post can belong to more than one category. Weblogs of this type can have each post placed in two or three different categories. Readers searching for previous posts on a topic may find that some posts fall into related categories and the can try browsing these as well.
Search facilities
The most direct method of letting readers find something on a weblog is to allow them to search it. Blogger was recently updated to include extensive searching facilities (hardly surprising, as it is owned by search engine giant Google). Some weblog systems have add-ons that enable searching and bloggers can also make use of search engines that operate outside of their weblog system. Another option is to use a site-specific search offered by search engine companies. Google has indexed hundreds of millions of pages on the Web, so if your weblog has been online for any length of time, Google has probably indexed it.
Google lets you limit a search to the pages within their index of your site by adding the words site:myblog.com into the search box, or you can add a Google search boxto your site to do the same thing automatically.
Altavista's advanced searchalso lets you limit searches to a specific site.
ACTIVITY 1.6
Take a look at some of your favourite blogs. How good are their searching facilities?
Trackback
Trackback is a mechanism used in weblogs to show a list of other weblogs that refer to a specific post. The term was coined by Six Apart (http://www.sixapart.com/), the producers of Moveable Type and TypePad. Trackback works by sending a specialised message known as a ping between the blogs concerned. The receiving blog normally displays the trackback information below a post. This information normally includes a summary of what has been written on the target weblog, along with the URL and the name of the weblog. There is a good explanation of how trackback works at: http://www.movabletype.org/trackback/beginners/.
Trackback is fairly straightforward. If you're posting about something you've seen on another blog, which has trackback enabled, you can paste the trackback URL into the appropriate spot in your own blogging software, and the software will build a link from the original post to yours, without the other blogger doing anything. Trackback currently depends on individual readers making links. However, there is some interest in automatic creation of trackbacks, a process known as threading.
Unfortunately, Blogger does not yet support trackback, although the same effect can be achieved via the use of backlinks, which provide a way of expanding the comment feature to allow related discussions on other sites to be included along with the regular comments on a post. The backlinks setting can be found under the Settings | Comments tab and consists only of the option to turn it on or off. The default templates are already set up with the necessary code for backlinks. Once everything is set up and you have republished your blog, you will see the number of backlinks listed for each post, along with the number of comments. Clicking the link will take you to the post page, where the backlinks are all listed beneath the comments. Clicking the triangles next to each link will display an extract of text from the page linking to you, as well as author and date information. Haloscan provides a third-party trackback and commenting system which can be used with Blogger or other blog services.
ACTIVITY 1.7
Take a look at some of your favourite blogs. Do they support Trackback?
[edit] Structure
Structure includes concepts such as linear and hierarchical structures, timelines and semantic blogging.
Before we examine the structure of weblogs in detail, it’s worth taking another brief look at how they evolved over time. Some time around 1998, people began producing web pages that consisted mainly of short thoughts and were updated frequently. This was a major departure from traditional web pages, which tended to consist of longer sections of text which were seldom updated. The World Wide Web was originally developed as a form of electronic publishing and used a page-based structure derived from print media. Web sites consist of pages which have paragraphs, headers and links to other pages. These were modelled after printed pages and web sites were similar to books, being a way to bind many pages together.
Once the web became popular, web site authors began to look for ways of keeping their visitors interested and attracting them back to the site. Interesting content was the key to attracting visitors and interesting design, photography or writing ensured that visitors would enjoy their time on the site and made them ore likely to return and to spread the word about the site. Regular updates also helped to ensure that visitors would return, but unfortunately, these were not easy to do. If you wanted to add a new page to a web site, you first had to write the content and save it locally on your computer. You then needed to decide where the new page fitted into your site and perhaps make changes to the other pages so they pointed at your new site. Adding a single new page often led to numerous changes across a site. When the changes were complete, the whole site needed to be uploaded again, normally by using an FTP program.
When you combine a page-based method of structuring a web site with the effort required to make changes, you can see why Web sites built around pages of content were often regarded as static. Once a page was written it was practically set in stone (just as with a book) and the information on the page began to age. The content rarely changed because of the effort required on the part of the site owner to make changes. Static pages and infrequent updates made visitors unlikely to come back or spread the word about the site.
Modern web sites are much more active, eg: sites that forecast the weather, let you check your bank balance or buy movie tickets or CDs as well as news sites that bring you the latest news and sometimes change completely every few minutes. Most of the web sites frequented by the general public no longer resemble collections of pages or books. They are filled with smaller chunks of information or information fetched from large databases. A web page describing new content available on a single site, or on the Internet as a whole, has much in common with a weblog: a chronological list of dates may be used to organise the page, and it may include small chunks of text and links to specific locations. Some of the earliest web pages were "what's new" pages, covering new developments on a single server.
When weblogs appeared initially, they were structured in a way that hadn’t been seen before. Instead of having new pages added each day, a single index page for a site would change slightly as small chunks of text and new links appeared each day. They were post-based rather than page-based. Weblogs rapidly gathered audiences because they changed frequently and were easy to read and digest. They were often full of links to interesting offsite pages, encouraging readers to return each day to find new links to obscure places.
Unlike static page-based sites, weblogs are dynamic. Unlike traditional Web sites that consist of multiple pages, weblogs often contain only a few pages: the initial index page and archive pages. The newest posts, filled with the latest content are displayed on the index page. The index page is normally first on the site, so visitors only need to remember a short Web address to revisit it. Most bloggers set their index page to show a week's postings. They should also have a clear and simple navigation system, so readers can find other pages easily.
Archive pages are used to store posts permanently. Most weblog management systems copy a new post to both the index page and the current archive page. Archive pages are built automatically by the blogging software and act as a backup of old material that was previously on the index page and also enable visitors to go back and read older posts. Most bloggers archive posts monthly, but some weblog systems allow authors to specify daily or single post archives, sometimes using calendars with links to each day's posts.
Weblog tools began to appear in mid 1999 to aid in the creation of weblogs. The tools varied in their support for features, but they were all fairly automated, removing the need to use FTP to transfer files between your desktop and a server. Publishing new posts to a weblog became as easy as filling out a Web-based form online and pressing a button. Weblogs altered the way people viewed Web sites, as they were about new posts rather than new pages. Reading one or two new paragraphs each day was easy for readers, compared to reading new 1,000-word essay each day.
Traditional Web sites had a page-based structure, but weblogs were post-based and built of small chunks of information, sometimes referred to as microcontent, which are easy to read and understand and small enough to be displayed flexibly: a weblog post could become the contents of a short e-mail, an instant message or even a text message to a mobile phone. Each item of microcontent can have a permanent Web address allowing others to point to specific ideas within a post.
All weblog management systems number posts in some way, usually by means of a post ID, a unique string of numbers that corresponds to a specific post. Weblogs built with Blogger have a long string of numbers for each post because there have already been millions of posts made. Blogger automatically builds permanent links which are automatically added to each post with a named anchor set to the unique post ID.
Permalinks are then added to the bottom of each post and clearly marked. These provide a method of linking directly to posts on other weblogs. Unless your weblog has them, no one will be able to link to specific posts. Permalinks give a fixed, permanent address to every post on your weblog, and are powerful mechanism for spreading ideas and understanding the importance of microcontent. Most weblog systems provide some way of creating permalinks, and they may be included in the default templates, but there is no standard way of handling permalinks.Some systems add the word "permalink" or simply "link" to the end of each post while others use special characters to indicate a permalink and some weblogs wrap the permalink around a timestamp to show exactly when the post was made.
As noted previously, many weblogs allow some sort of categorisation, or some form of title or subject for each post. Depending on the weblog you are using, you may be able to add a subject or title above each post, and organise posts into categories of your own choosing. These offer different ways to find and organise information in weblogs aside from simply by date. Subject names or titles can give additional information about posts, and they can also be used elsewhere on your site. If you are syndicating your content, you may simply want to point to your post by title, then mention titles in your archives. This allows readers to find older posts by reading from a list of titles instead of guessing which date contained a specific post.
Many weblogs includes the facility to make comments on specific posts. You’ll often find a link at the foot of weblog posts, indicating how readers can leave comments.
ACTIVITY 1.8
Take a look at some of your favourite blogs. Do they have permalinks? Do they allow archived posts to be searched by category? Can readers leave comments?
Linear vs hierarchical structure
The style of weblogs is generally very linear. It is well-suited to news, diaries and interesting links on the web, but it is less suitable for long-term, goal-oriented discussion of a subject, or collaborative content creation. Others forms of social software, such as wikis, may be better suited to these purposes. Some blogging software provides a limited degree of hierarchical structure by means of categorisation and comment threading.
Semantic blogging
Semantic blogging is one of the current research areas in blogging. Basically it involves applying the principles of the semantic web in the blog environment. The semantic web is an attempt to do the same for machine readable data as the World Wide Web did for human readable documents. It aims to transform information processing by providing a common way that data can be accessed, linked together and understood in order to turn the web from a large hyperlinked book into a large interlinked database.
You can find an introductory article on the semantic web at: http://education.guardian.co.uk/elearning/story/0,10577,981948,00.html and a more critical view can be found at: http://www.shirky.com/writings/semantic_syllogism.html
In relation to blogging, the most important notion is that of semantic search and navigation, ie: searches based on the meaning of terms rather than simply the words. . Steve Cayzer (see below) gives an example based on distinguishing between the island of Java and the Java programming language:
“Once aggregators "understand" the difference between Java the language and Java the island, and that your blog category 'Java' is a specialisation of my category 'Programming Languages', they can provide semantically relevant results rather than just syntactic matches. Moreover, these results can be sorted, filtered and presented in a meaningful fashion.”
Cayzer’s work is complex. You can find a brief description at: http://jena.hpl.hp.com/~stecay/papers/xmleurope2004/040420_semblog_draft10.html
Cayzer has also constructed a semantic blogging demonstrator to illustrate some of the principles involved.
[edit] Connectedness
Connectedness is concerned with links, particularly to other blogs and newsfeeds, but also to the Web in general. We’ve already given some consideration to links (Section 1.1.5) and there’s more information in Section 2.
[edit] Presentation
Visual design
A wide range of visual design elements can be used to enhance blogs. Many of these elements are available simply by customising existing web page templates. Design elements include the following:
- Computer-mediated communication (CMC) elements: email addresses, instant messenger (IM) contact information, message boards and guestbooks.
- Color alterations: changing the base colour of a common weblog template
- Colours that clash: using colour schemes that detract from the visibility of the words, particularly those that register before you notice associated text.
- Colours in titles and headings: any colour other then black or white
- Custom banners
- Custom calendar design
- Custom color text
- Custom cursors
- Custom fonts
- Custom graphical dividers: images
- Custom table borders
- Data representations: counters
- Custom rules between entries: made up of images or another non-color based divider
- Pre- and post-icons: icons in the header and footer of posts
- Photographic backgrounds
- Scrolling headers
- Graphical smilies
You can find an interesting discussion on the use of these elements and others at: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/common_visual.html. The authors (Lois Ann Scheidt and Elijah Wright of Indiana University at Bloomington) examine the use of visual design elements across a range of randomly-selected weblogs and make some interesting observations. In their introduction they state that:
“The availability of visual design elements - division of the screen into columns, image use, color and typeface choice … along with the placement of elements on the page permitting meaning to be suspended in the visual …allows for non-textual self-expression… New users of the medium have adopted fewer "innovations" than their forbears: as notions of what constitutes a "weblog" concretize, the creative use of visual and hypertextual features seems to be in decline. Design innovations breaking out of a certain "acceptable" visual style are increasingly rare, while weblogs that conform to expectations - three-column, smaller text down the side, prominent header and footer, some links and sparse image use …continue to be created.”
ACTIVITY 1.9
When you get round to creating weblogs of your own, take some time to consider the visual design elements. If your weblog stands out from the pack, it stands more chance of being noticed.
Typography
The typography (ie: the choice and use of typefaces or fonts) of blogs, and of websites in general, has been a rather neglected area in the past, but a new website is trying to address the problem. The author describes the site as a work in progress and intends building up the content gradually.
ACTIVITY 1.10
Bookmark this site and revisit it regularly to check for new material. Is any of this relevant to your own blogs?
Further information about web typography can be found at the following site which concentrates on accessibility and usability issues: http://www.scotconnect.com/webtypography/
[edit] Evaluating blogs
Blogs are not equal in terms of the quality of information provided and should always be evaluated carefully. The quality of information relates to the following attributes:
Relevance: information is relevant if it relates to the subject under investigation.
Accuracy: information is accurate if it is factually correct – or at least known not to be factually incorrect.
Clarity: information is clear if it is well written in accordance with the rules for clear and simple writing.
Brevity: information is brief if it is succinct and to-the-point
Depth/detail: information is detailed if sufficient information is provided to give the reader a clear understanding of the subject matter.
Timeliness: information is timely if it is up-to-date.
Note that some of these attributes conflict – there is a tension between brevity and depth, and it is difficult to maintain a blog’s timeliness and accuracy.
For the purposes of this course you should be able to evaluate blogs according to the following criteria:
Design: see Good Blog Design: Speed, Accessibility, Transparency and Clarity and also Well Designed Weblogs: An Introduction
Ease of use (usability): generally the same standards are applied as for website usability. However, there is some discussion as to whether this is appropriate. Both sites provide numerous useful links on usability.
Navigation: a useful article on blog/website navigation design can be found at: http://www.guuui.com/issues/01_05.php and another one at: http://tapestrydesigns.typepad.com/design_niche/2005/01/navigation_desi.html
Collaborative features: most blogs support a number of collaborative features, eg:
- Readers can post comments.
- Blogs may be jointly authored.
- There are links to similar blogs (blogrolls).
- Content can be syndicated via automated systems such as RSS.
- Blogs can comment on (or re-circulate) content from other blogs.
A useful summary of blogs as a collaborative tool can be found at: http://cne.sitempower.com/site.cfm/blogs.cfm
Links: links are a major component of blogs. They can be made to other blogs or websites and that links may occur in the main text or in a list of links. Links are discussed extensively elsewhere in these notes (Sections 1.1.5 and 2).
Quality of information: information obtained from blogs must be evaluated critically in the same way as information obtained any other online source. There may be additional difficulties if a blog consists largely of quotations and links. A selection of useful resources can be found at: http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/research/webeval.html
One interesting approach is the use of the “Kapoun Criteria”: Accuracy, Authority, Currency, Objectivity and Coverage. See: http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/research/webcrit.html
ACTIVITY 1.11
Follow the link above to find out about the Kapoun Criteria, then check one of your favourite weblogs. To what extent does it meet these criteria?
[edit] Common uses of blogs
The potential uses of blogs are almost limitless. They can be used for anything that involves communicating or publishing information on the World Wide Web. Common uses include teaching and educational and corporate use.
According to Silkblogs:
“A blog is a means of sharing thoughts and ideas. Your blog can be a personal diary, a project collaboration tool, a guide, or any means of communicating and publishing information on the web. Its uses are as limitless as your imagination.”
Blogs in teaching
Blogs can be used in teaching, eg:http://www.eschoolnews.com/eti/archives/2004/10/000190.php
There is an interesting matrix of educational uses at: http://www.edtechpost.ca/gems/matrix2.gif
There's also a good workshop/tutorial for teachers learning about blogging. See Getting Started with Blogging in Education.
Blogs in project management
Blogs can also be used to manage projects, eg: http://www.infosential.com/archives/2005/01/10_ways_to_use_blogs_for_.php
Corporate blogs
There are a variety of corporate uses for blogs. See: http://www.corporateblogging.info/2004/08/six-types-of-business-blogs.asp
[edit] Creating a blog to perform a specific information task
[edit] Defining the purpose of the blog and its target readership
You should know the purpose and target readership of the blog before creating it. The purpose may influence the selection of an appropriate blog creation tool, eg: to what extent are collaboration facilities required. It may also influence the overall style of the blog, eg: a corporate blog is likely to be more formal than one devoted to a rock band.
Target readership is also an important consideration as this is likely to influence the design of the blog. One critical aspect to be considered here is readability. Some useful information can be found at: http://www.write101.com/letham2.htm
There’s a lot more information about purpose and target readership in Section 2.3 of these notes.
[edit] Using blog creation tools efficiently and effectively
You should be aware of the wide variety of blog creation tools available, the differences between them and where they can be obtained. There is a useful list of free blog providers at:
http://weblogs.about.com/od/weblogsoftwareandhosts/a/topfreeblogs.htm
This includes the following providers, amongst others:
- WordPress: http://wordpress.org/
- Blogger.com: http://www.blogger.com/
- Moveable Type: http://www.movabletype.org/
There are also a number of reasonably-priced commercial services, eg:
- Blog Identity: http://www.domaindirect.com/blogid.html
- Centada: http://www.centada.com/
Further lists may be found at the following locations:
[edit] Blogger.com
There are two ways of creating your own weblog: on your own website, if you already have one, or by hosting your weblog with a specialised provider.
The advantage of the first solution is that you have total control over the weblog and the software used, but it is significantly more complicated, as you need to download the software and install and configure it.
The advantage of the second method is that you don’t have to worry about anything: you only need to create an account with the service provider and write the content of your weblog.
For our first weblog, we’ll stick with the easy way. After creating the weblog we’ll take a look at how you can personalise the design.
Let’s look at how we can create a weblog. In just a few minutes we’ll create a weblog in Blogger.com, a popular American service provider, owned by Google.
Start your browser and enter www.blogger.com in the address bar. You’ll see the following screen:
The home page allows you to create a new account or begin a session, so we’ll start by creating a new account.
Click on Create your blog now to open the Create an account page:
ACTIVITY 2.1
Enter the following data on this page:
- • User name
- • Enter a Password
- • Retype Password
- • Display name (for signing the articles you write)
- • Email Address
Make sure that you pick a user name and a display name (these can be the same if you like) that does not allow you to be personally identified, eg: use something like BloggerBill rather than William McDonald.
Once you’ve entered this data, tick the box Accept the Terms of Service and click on Continue.
Next, you’ll see a page headed Name your Blog:
You must give the blog a title and enter the URL (web address), which is made up of anything_you_like.blogspot.com. Let’s call ours Weblog Example One and use the URL http://www.weblogex1.blogspot.com.
ACTIVITY 2.2
Enter the title and URL for your weblog. (You’ll need to choose a different URL.
A weblog consists of a number of web pages. Just like a “normal” website, we must save these pages onto an Internet server so that other users can access them.
By default, Blogger will host your weblog on the Blogger server. This is a free service, but advertising will appear on each page. You can upgrade to a service which does not display advertising on payment of a small annual fee.
You can also choose to host your site at another location by clicking on Advanced Blog setup. This will open another page where you can enter the configuration details for the other server.
At the moment, we’re not going to do this, so if you’ve opened the Advanced Blog Setup, go back to the previous page and click Continue.
The final stage is the choice of a design template for your weblog pages. This is simply a case of selecting one from those shown.
You can easily change the template, or replace it with another of your own design. You can look at the various templates by clicking on the View icon. To select a template simply click on the check box next to its name. For the moment, let’s choose the right-hand one, Minima.
ACTIVITY 2.3
Take a look at the available templates and choose the one you want to use for your weblog. (You can choose a different one if you like, but remember that if you do your webblog will look different from the examples in these notes.)
Click on Continue and within a few seconds a window will appear saying:
Your blog has been created!
Now click on Start Posting to publish your first article.
Publishing your first article
The terms article and entry are used interchangeably to refer to the posts to a weblog.
We’ve already created our weblog and we’re now at the administration page, the control panel of the weblog. Notice that there are a number of distinct tabs:
As you can see, we are currently on the Posting tab and the Create button is active. Within this tab you’ll see a large field entitled Post, and just above it, a field entitled Title.
ACTIVITY 2.4
Write “My First Entry” in the Title field and “Hello World” in the Post field. Now click Preview, at the top right of the Post field. Within a few seconds Blogger will show you the article as it will appear in the weblog.
Check the text. If there are any errors, you can correct them by clicking on Hide Preview. If the text is correct, click on the Publish Post button and Blogger will publish the weblog. Alter a few seconds Blogger will confirm that the article has been published successfully:
Click on View Blog (in a new window) to see the result:
We’ve finished creating our first weblog and publishing our first article in only a few minutes. If you want, you can give the address of your weblog to your friends, so that they can visit it, but maybe you should wait until you’ve made a few improvements. Let’s look first at changing the template.
To change the template of your weblog, click first on the Template tab, then click on Pick New. This will open a template selection page similar to the one we saw when we created the weblog:
Pick a template from the list and click View to obtain a preview. If you’re happy, click Use This Template to select it. Now click Republish to modify the pages you’ve already published.
Opening and closing a session
That’s us finished for the moment, so click Sign Out at the top right of the administration panel to disconnect and return to the Blogger.com home page. You should always exit from the administration panel in this way, especially if you are share a computer with other users. If you don’t sign out, any other user can make changes to your weblog, without knowing your password.
The next time you connect, you’ll need to enter the user name and password that you chose when you signed up for your account. Whatever you do, don’t forget these!
Enter your user name and password in the fields at the top right hand of the page and click on Sign in:
The Blogger user interface
As we’ve already