Introduction to Blogging
Introduction to Blogging:
What is a “blog”?
“Blog” is the abbreviation of the word “weblog.” This term refers to a website that holds a continuous stream of information. A blog is a personal website that is updated often and has links to articles on other sites. Blogs can be anything the author wants it to be, personal or political, and can include one topic or a range of topics.
Although blogs talk about many different subjects, such as web design, home staging, sports, or mobile technology, most all 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.
The Blog Content
Content is the most important part of any website. A retail website has a catalog of products and list of store locations. University sites contain information about their campuses, curriculum, and faculty. News sites feature the latest news. A personal blog might contain observations, reviews, and thoughts. If there is no updated content, no one will want to come back to the website more than once.
On a blog, the content is the articles, or posts, that the author writes. There can be multiple authors for a blog site. Blog authors usually write their articles in a web-based interface, which is built into the blogging system. Some blogging systems also support the ability to use stand-alone “weblog client” software, which allows authors to write articles offline and upload them at a later time.
Things Bloggers Need to Know
In addition to understanding how your specific blogging software works, such as Shoestring, there are some terms and concepts you need to know.
Archives
A blog may have an archive that is based on dates, maybe monthly or yearly. This helps users to find a previous article easily.
Feeds
A Feed is a function of special software that allows “Feedreaders” to access a site automatically looking for new content and then post updates about that new content to another site.
Blogroll
A blogroll is a list of sites that are usually other blogs and have similar information. It is usually a sidebar on the page or a separate page dedicated to the blogroll. Shoestring has a built-in Link Manager so the author can manage and create there own blogroll.
Managing Comments
One of the most exciting features of blogging tools are the comments. This highly interactive feature allows users to comment upon article posts and link to your posts and comment on and recommend them. These are known as trackbacks and pingbacks . We’ll also discuss how to moderate and manage comments and how to deal with the annoying trend in “comment spam”, when unwanted comments are posted to your blog.
Trackbacks
Trackbacks were originally developed by SixApart, creators of the MovableType blog package.
An explanation of a trackback:
- 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.
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 his readers) see some of what Person B had to say, and encouraging them all to click over 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.)
Pingbacks
Pingbacks were designed to solve some of the problems that people saw with trackbacks. There are three significant differences between pingbacks and trackbacks, though.
1. Pingbacks and trackbacks use drastically different communication technologies (XML-RPC and HTTP POST, respectively).
2. Pingbacks support auto-discovery where the software automatically finds out the links in a post, and automatically tries to pingback those URLs, while trackbacks must be done manually by entering the trackback URL that the trackback should be sent to.
3. Pingbacks do not send any content.
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.
The pingback is generally displayed on Person A’s blog as simply a link to Person B’s post. In this way, all editorial control over posts rests exclusively with the individual authors (unlike the trackback excerpt, which can be edited by the trackback recipient). The automatic verification process introduces a level of authenticity, making it harder to fake a pingback.
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 because they create a verifiable connection between posts.
Verifying Pingbacks and Trackbacks
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. Trackbacks and Pingbacks both aim to provide some verification to blog commenting.
Comment Moderation
Comment Moderation is a feature which allows the website owner and author to monitor and control the comments on the different article posts, and can help in getting rid of comment spam. It lets you moderate comments, and you can delete unwanted comments, approve good comments and make other decisions about the comments.
Comment Spam
Comment Spam refers to useless comments (or trackbacks, or pingbacks) to posts on a blog. These are often irrelevant to the context value of the post. They can contain one or more links to other websites or domains. Spammers use Comment Spam as a medium to get higher page rank for their domains in Google, so that they can sell their domains at a higher price sometime in the future or to obtain a high ranking in search results for an existing website.
Spammers are relentless; because there can be substantial money involved, they work hard at their “job.” They even build automated tools (robots) to rapidly submit their spam to the same or multiple weblogs. Many webloggers, especially beginners, sometimes feel overwhelmed by Comment Spam.
There are solutions, though, to avoiding Comment Spam. Shoestring includes many tools for combating Comment Spam. With a little up front effort, Comment Spam can be manageable, and certainly no reason to give up weblogging.
Pretty Permalinks
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 to your 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 default Permalink (poorly-structured) to a story might look in a default Shoestring 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 which could link to the same article, once the installation is configured to modify permalinks:
/archives/2003/05/23/my-cheese-sandwich/
It is easy to guess that the Permalink includes the date of the posting, and the title, just by looking at the 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. For more information on possible Permalink patterns in Shoestring, see Using Permalinks.
Blog be Email
Some blogging tools offer the ability to email your posts directly to your blog, all without direct interaction through the blogging tool interface. Shoestring offers this great feature. Using email, you can now send in your post content to a pre-determined email address.
Post Slugs
If you’re using Pretty Permalinks, the Post Slug is the title of your article post within the link. The blogging tool software may simplify or truncate your title into a more appropriate form for using as a link. A title such as “I’ll Make A Wish” might be truncated to “ill-make-a-wish”. In Shoestring, you can change the Post Slug to something else, like “make-a-wish”, which sounds better than making it sound like you are sick.
Excerpt
Excerpts are condensed summaries of your blog posts, with blogging tools being able to handle these in various ways. In Shoestring, Excerpts can be specifically written to summarize the post, or generated automatically by using the first few paragraphs of a post or using the post up to a specific point, assigned by you.
Plugins
Plugins are cool bits of programming scripts that add additional functionality to your blog. These are often features which either enhance already available features or add them to your site.
Shoestring offers simple and easy ways of adding Plugins to your blog. From the Administration Panel, there is a Plugin page. Once you have uploaded a Plugin to your Shoestring plugin directory, activate it from the Plugins Management SubPanel, and sit back and watch your Plugin work. Not all Plugins are so easily installed, but Shoestring Plugin authors and developers make the process as easy as possible.
Basics- A Few Blogging Tips
Starting a new blog is difficult and this can put many people off. There are lots of people who have blogs with no comments or visits. You want to stand out from this crowd of millions of bloggers, you want to be one of the few hundred thousand blogs that are actually visited. So here are some simple tips to help you on your way to blogging mastery:
1. Post regularly, but don’t post if you have nothing worth posting about.
2. Stick with only a few specific genres to talk about.
3. Don’t put ‘subscribe’ and ‘vote me’ links all over the front page until you have enough people visiting your site that like your blog enough to ignore them (they’re usually just in the way).
4. Use a clean and simple theme if at all possible.
5. Enjoy. Blog for fun and comment on other peoples’ blogs (as they normally visit back).