Daisy’s Blog

I’ve been reading alot about blogging lately, since I’m trying to start one of my own. At first I found it to be disorienting to try to jump right in and start writing, with all of the new web gadgets and gizmos and terms being used and thrown around. I’ve actually been reading atleast ten times more than writing.

One of the most helpful things I’ve done so far has been to de-mystify the terminology surrounding the blogging process. I feel I should share this with others, since it’s being so helpful to me as I get started on my own blog.

First, here’s some of the basic terminology:

• Post - An article or entry. These are the tidbits you write.
• Tags - Keywords associated with the article. I’m finding that using these fairly liberally seems to be standard.
• Categories - Groups of posts on a similar theme. In Wordpress, the blogging software I’m using, categories group things together and get a link on the navigation. Posts can live in multiple categories, but these aren’t applied quite so liberally as tags.
• Tag Cloud - A group of tags used on your blog site. I’m still not certain wether these are just all of the tags you’ve used, or if they somehow relate to the individual article (post) you’re viewing. Can someone clarify this for me?

Those were the first terms I needed to be familiar with in order to write a bit on my blog. Next, I’m going to go a little bit deeper and look into the publishing options and terms related to that, like trackbacks, rss, and links.

• Blogroll - The blogroll contains a list of other blogs that you link to. Like links to other websites, or a friends blog. You can also add a ‘rel’ tag to specify the relation between your blogs, in a format called XFN.
• XFN - the XHTML Friends Network is a way of specifying relationships between people and sites through linking. Very neat! Can be used by crawlers to make free-form social networks without restrictive, proprietary services.
• RSS - stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’, its a way of letting people subscribe to your blog with a RSS reader. Basically it provides an address that thier software connects to every so often to check your site for new posts. Often these softwares are set up to have a lot of feeds, and are constantly getting articles from many sources. Just too cool! I’m going to have to get one myself, so I can keep up with my friends blogs without having to bookmark them all, and go to them only to find nothing new that day. Now when there’s something new, it will come to me instead!
• Trackback - I haven’t been able to use these yet, so I’m not completely clear on how they work, so again if someone can clarify for me please? My understanding is that they’re like links to other blogs, but they notify the other blog operator that your post links to theirs. Wikipedia says: This allows for conversations spanning several blogs that readers can easily follow. I can’t wait to see something like that in action!

That’s all I’ve figured out so far, I hope this might be helpful to someone that’s starting out in this sometimes confusing enterprise of blogging.

Blogging blog101

I’ve never blogged before, so this should serve as a warning that I’m not really sure what the commonly accepted stylings are, or what to do. I like to write. I did well with it in school. I really don’t know about all of these new technologies I’m getting dumped into though. A quick glimpse at the ‘add this’ button on a few other blogs that I was reading listed over thirty ways to add something. I’m not even sure what a trackback or a technorati is, so I’m hoping I can just start writing and linking to things, and that it will all fall into place sooner or later. I do like finding out about new things, and there are certainly a ton of new things here.

If anyone with some blogging experience should happen to stumble across this post and feel like sharing some knowledge, please do. I really wish there was a ‘So, you want to blog?’ manual. Maybe there is, buried in the interwebs somewhere. I’ll see if I can’t find it later.

I think that I’m a latecomer to the scene when it comes to this, and that most of the other people that blog successfully have probably been doing it while the technology for doing it evolved into its current state.  That puts them at somewhat of an advantage I guess, of having a more innate understanding of the thing.  RSS Feeds, Tag Clouds, XFN — XML tags that link sites and show interpersonal relationships at the same time. Its an amazing world of web gadgetry I had no idea about. Its actually a wonderful challenge and I’m looking forward to taking it on.

Blogging blog101