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A Gentle Introduction To Blogging
If you or your organisation are starting to think about blogging here's a quick whistle stop tour of blogging that will help you hit the ground running. As with any technology there are a few terms that are banded around as commonplace that you might not be familiar with but which can be useful when starting to blog.
Blog
The word blog is used to mean the actual site where you will publish your articles and news. It can also be used as a verb, e.g. "Are you going to blog that?", meaning, are you going to put that on the blog.
Post
In the world of blogs, post is the word used to mean individual pieces of writing e.g. an article, news update or tutorial etc.
You can "post" a piece of news or link to a particular post.
Commments
By default, all blogging software will enable your readers to add comments at the end if any articles you have written. Depending on the software that you are using to write your blog, you will have options to manage how people can comment. You can require people to register or provide an email address before being allowed to comment. You can also set options so that you can check what people have said in their comments before they appear to the public. You will also be able to treat certain people as "trusted" once they have already posted comments
Whatever you choose to do, don't forget, it's your blog and you can allow or deny whatever comments you want.
Comment Spam
Once your blog has been running for a few weeks you'll probably encounter the scourge of comment spam. This can take a couple of forms. The most common form is automatically generated by computers adding comments to thousands of blogs in the hope that some will be approved. This type of spam usually has a link in it to another website that the spammer wants your readers to visit.
Most blogging systems have a spam filter built in and will catch the bulk of this type of spam automatically.
The second type of comment spam is often created manually by someone visiting your site and can be quite subtle. The person may compliment your site and then suggest that others visit their site. They may promote a competing product or organisation. Once again, remember, it's your blog and you can allow or disallow whatever content you want.
Permalinks
A permalink is just a link to a specific post on a blog.
They are given a special name because by their very nature posts can appear in many different places in a blog and so it can be useful to have one unique link to give to a person if they want to visit a particular article. For example when a post is first written, it may appear on the home page of the blog, but then over time, drop off the home page as other articles are written. It may also appear in a list of posts of a particular category. But when telling people about your post, it's best to send them the permalink as this is the most reliable place to find the post.
Blogosphere
The blogosphere is the community of all the blogs on the web. When you create a blog, it joins the blogosphere. Although this is just a notional term, it does have some importance, as search engines do tend to index frequently updated blogs more often than what they regard as more traditional web sites.
Blogroll
The is a common section in a blog where bloggers link to other blogs that they like. It is not compulsory to have a blog roll.
Draft
Blogging systems such as WordPress enable you to write your posts online and save them without publishing them. Therefore you can use your blog as a kind of scratchpad where you start creating an article and come back to it later to enhance it before completing it and publishing it.
Scheduled Posts
Even when you have completed a post, you may not want it to appear on your blog until a specific time and date. This is called a scheduled post. Some bloggers write several posts in one sitting and schedule them for publication at a later date. This can help reduce your work load and ensure that their is a regular and predictable flow of information from your blog.
Post Frequency
This relates to how often you post articles. There are different schools of thought on this and it really depends on what type of blog you run, but it is generally believed that to help build reader loyalty, it it best to have a rythmn to your blogging, be that every day, once a week or once a month.
Trackback
You can set the comments section of your blog to show which other blogs are linking to that particular post.
Whenever anyone links to one of your posts, that link appears as a comment on that post.
Moderation
The process of holding a comment for review by someone responsible for the blog. This enables you to catch spam, or libelous and damaging comments.
Post Categories
Because blogs are generally published in reverse chronological order, like a diary, one entry after another, bloggers usually assign categories to their posts to help organise and collate them.
A post can have more than one category. The full list of categories is usually shown on a blog page, a bit like an index, so that readers can easily access other posts that may be of interest to them. The categories for a particular post are usually also shown either at the top or the end of the post.
Pages v Posts
When you publish a post on your blog, it usually appears on the home page of the blog. If you add another post, the previous post may then be shunted down the home page or be removed from the home page altogether. So posts move their position over time.
By contrast, a page on a blog always remains in the same place in the blog. Pages (or static pages) are usually used to convey general information such as an overview of the blog or project, details of the author or a contact form.
Posts are affected by time, pages are the structural elements of a blog. Many blogs have no static pages at all.
RSS Feed
If you have a feed on your blog (most do), all of the posts that you create are added to a single file called an RSS feed. Visitors can subscribe to that feed using an RSS reader, a web browser or their email package. When ever the file is updated (i.e. when a new post is published) they will see that there is something new on the blog without even having to visit it.
Widgets
Most blogging systems have some kind of plug-ins or widgets that you can add to your blog design. These can be small snippets of code that, for example, enable you to show a gallery of photos, the top 5 most read posts, or that display the 5 latest comments.
So, if you're new to blogging I hoe this help you get to grips with some of the terms. But don't forget, it's not the jargon that counts, but what you write. Good luck and happy blogging.