About Blogging

BLOG = weB-LOG. A web log, or "blog," is a great way to share information online. Blogging software allows you to create webpages without having to learn anything about webpage design or website maintenance. The information you want to publish is organized in a "journal" format, with the most recent days appearing on the front page of the website, and with previous days accessible through the archive pages, which are all created for you automatically. You type the information you want to publish into a form, hit the publish button, and you are online!

Here is some terminology that will help you understand more about blogging and how you can get started with your own online blog!

Blog service . There are many companies that provide blog services. One of the most popular free services is Blogger.com.

Blogger.com . Blogger.com, a part of Google, provides its services for free. It costs nothing to create a Blogger.com account, and as part of your account you can create as many blogs as you want.

FTP . FTP, or file-transfer-protocol, is how the pages of your blog are transferred from your blog provider (for example, Blogger.com) to your web space (for example, your OU webspace).

Posts and posting . The entries that you make to your blog are called "posts," and the process of creating and publishing those posts is called "posting."

Archive . As you accumulate more and more posts in your blog, the older posts are moved to an "archive" where they can still be viewed, although they are no longer shown on the front page of your blog.

Permalink . A very important feature of blogging is that each post has its own unique URL, which makes it possible for people to link to your blog posts. This permanent post address is usually called a "permalink" (although this terminology varies from one blogging service to another). Blogger also uses the term "post page" to refer to the permanent webpage where a blog post can be found.

Template . The template provides the design of your blog (the posts are the content). Since the design and the content are separated, that means you can change the look of your blog at any time, without having to make any changes to the content you have published.

Comments . Many blogging services, including Blogger, allow people to make "comments" about the posts in your blog. You can decide if this is a feature that you want to use or not.

Group blogging . Although most blogs belong to specific individuals, there are also "group blogs" where more than one person is able to post to the blog. It's easy to make group blogs at Blogger.com .

Syndication . Because content and design are kept separate in a blog, it is possible for the content of your posts to be exported to some other location, separate from your blog. This process of exporting your content to another location is called "syndication."

Site feed . If you decide to make your blog content available for syndication, you do this by means of a "site feed", which is a special webpage that reproduces your blog posts without any of the template's design features. The site feed is in a format called XML, "Extensible Markup Language."

Blog aggregator . A blog aggregator is a software program that allows you to collect the content from many different blogs into a single location. There are blog aggregator programs that you can install on your computer, or you can use a web-based blog aggregator like bloglines.com .

Javascript . Another way to use a site feed is to display that site feed as content inside a webpage or inside Blackboard! No special programming skills are required, thanks to the good folks at Maricopa Community College !