Blogging

Sue: November
Would you like to write to the web easily? Perhaps you would like to record your travel diary while on the road so you can have it in one place when you return home. You might also like to share this diary with others. It is now easy to do this on the web through blogs or web logs.

What are blogs?
Wikipedia states: "A blog is a website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order."

Blogging started in 1997 when the term was first published. However on-line journals were hard work in those days when a knowledge of html code was necessary. Blogging became quite popular in 2001, but is now very popular with many old and young people who form active online communities of people who may never see each other, but share some of the same passions.

A different world
In this online community people build relationships after reading the writing of others. This seems quite foreign to most of us "oldies" who are used to being introduced to someone, then gradually get to know him/her, and finally begin to share a few ideas at a time. Today, bloggers get right into the ideas people have and after reading them might begin a fairly in-depth conversation with the writer as if they already know him/her.

Web Weeds and Wisdom blog
Today, I created my very first blog by putting up my Web Weeds and Words article for last month. It was quite scary to put my work there for the world to read. However, it made sense to me as you will be able to link to the resources without typing them in and you can make comments on the site. I will also be able to put up pictures when I’m travelling and that should make the articles more interesting for you.

You can find this blog at http://webweedswisdom.blogspot.com/ and hopefully the other writers will join me there.

Set up your blog – It’s free!
If you would like to set up your own blog, there are many places to blog. If you want to join an easy site, go to http://www.blogger.com/start and start by creating your account. Enter a user name, password and the name you would like displayed (it might not be a real name; ours is Web Weeds and Wisdom), and then read the terms and accept them if you wish to continue. You will choose the name of your blog, which will form part of the address of the blog. Lastly you will choose a template to set the appearance of the blog. For this one I used Scribe.

To start, put in a heading and start writing with the Compose tab up on top. When you are finished save the draft so you can come back later and proofread or change it, or you can publish it on the web. It will then be immediately available at http://the nameyouchose.blogspot.com/. I’ll bet most of you never thought you could write to the web this easily!

I then went to the settings and chose who could read these postings. I decided all could do so without logging in, so each of you could try this out. I will probably restrict this to registered guests at some future date. You may decide to keep this private or available to invited guests only in the beginning.

RSS feeds
Do you remember in October I wrote about RSS feeds? Well, you can even have an rss feed created for your blog and then those near and dear to you can subscribe to your blog and will get updates as they happen. How cool is that?

Until next month, happy blogging…

Useful Websites
wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog
setting up a blog: http://www.blogger.com/start
Web Weeds & Wisdom blog: http://webweedswisdom.blogspot.com/