So, Just What Is A Blog?
Blogs are not the same as your common garden-variety Web sites.
- A blog is a kind or type of, Web site. It often has a registered domain name associated with it, and is often hosted at a paid-for web hosting service. A quick and overly simplistic definition of hosting, is that web hosting means where all the various files and gizmos that make up the blog (or Web site) are found on the Internet.
- A blog or Web site needs to hosted somewhere. Blogs can also be hosted for free at places like wordpress.com or blogger.com. These hosted-free blogs can have registered domain names associated with them too, but free-hosted blogs have limitations. Serious bloggers should strongly consider having their blog setup with paid-for hosting and certainly using a registered domain name. It’s best to Own Your Own Blog!
- A blog is a powerful and flexible way to publish information on the Internet, for just about any purpose you can imagine.
The word "blog" is created from "web log." A blog is an online chronicle, account, journal, or diary. It is made up of content that is published chronologically (the newest content appears at the top of the blog) in the form of entries that are called "posts." You are reading a blog post right now. Posts are saved in the blog, you can page backwards (travel back in posts time) through a blog and view all of the posts previously published. Blog "archives" are a special way to view older posts.
A blog can also be customized and configured so that it appears and behaves just like a regular Web site made up of individual pages linked to one another in various relationships. The blogging platform (or engine), that powers a blog can add this Web site-like functionality to a blog. For example, the WordPress blog engine is very good for configuring a blog to act like a common Web site … only with lots more flexibility, options, features, and power!
A blog can be published by just one person (probably the way most blogs make their way to the Internet) or by a team of people (an example would be a business) who create the content and information appearing on the blog.
Blogging is the process of writing the content (think words!) that make up the information in the blog posts. I was blogging as I wrote this post, then I clicked a button and published the post to the www.wpblogsandwebsites.com blog so you can read it.
Each post to a blog will have its own unique and permanent URL (Uniform Resource Locator) that someone can type into a browser address input box (or save as a bookmark in their browser) to arrive at that particular post in a blog. The author of the post, the post’s date, and categories (categories are ways to classify posts) the post belongs to, are usually included as parts of each post.
Readers of blog posts are often able to add their comments about the posts, to the posts. The reader comments (and the post author’s responses) are usually included or available to be read as part of the blog posts. So, discussion and communication are inherent to a blog.
A neat feature of a blog is that you can "subscribe" to the blog. This is done through RSS or syndication. What these fancy terms mean is that readers of a blog can use a special link that is part of the blog’s features, to view the content of the blog away from the actual blog.
A reader of your blog can keep track of what’s going on with your blog by subscribing to your blog (using the special subscriber link of the blog) with what is called a "reader" service. Google’s Reader is an example of such a blog reader subscription service.
All of this blog subscription and reader stuff comes in handy if you have a number of blogs you like to follow. Instead of having to visit each blog separately to see what’s new, all you have to do is go to your reader service. The blog reader service collects all of the new posts from all of the blogs you like to read in one place where you can view the content of the posts, or click on through to the various blogs. This makes it convenient to keep in touch with what’s going on in your favorite blogs in just one place.
WordPress is a very popular and very powerful blog publishing platform.
Suggested Posts to Learn More...
- What is RSS?
- Why Choose WordPress?
- Start A Free Beginner Blog
- 10 Blog Traffic Tips By Yaro Starak
- Choosing a Domain Name For Your Web site or Blog
Be Busy Blogging ... Own Your Own Blog ... WordPress Works Wonderfully
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