Blogging 101: What Is Blogging and What Is a Blog?
2010-07-11 Updated
2010-01-16 Initial Post
Here’s a 10,000 feet overview with miscellaneous comments thrown in:
- First off, I am NOT a blogger. I am a researcher and writer who focuses on IT systems administration topics; my writings are posted on a blog.
- People who use the term “blogger” as a job title need to be a bit more specific because the basic act of blogging itself is to post information on a Web site, which a trained monkey could do.
- If you call yourself a “blogger” and blog about finance, then you’re a finance writer. Don’t try to be hip and tell people you’re a “blogger.” I really hope the term goes away and people start referring back to their real job titles. Would a food critic refer to himself as an "eater," since that's the fundamental thing that he does? If he didn't eat, then he'd have nothing to write about.
- Blogging technology as we know it is only about 10 years old and its number of years of mainstream popularity is even less. The basic act of blogging itself has been around forever since it’s really just writing to a (electronic) journal.
- Blogging technology is an extension of existing Web technology since a modern blog is, at its core, a dynamic Web site. An e-commerce site is a specialized Web site to sell products and a blog is a specialized Web site for disseminating information and knowledge. There is nothing revolutionary about blogging technology itself since it advances pretty much in-step with Web technology.
- Blogging software installs on top of Web server software and also requires a database (I think some blogging systems don't require a database, but having one adds a lot more functionality, so consider a database as a requirement) to store blog posts and configuration data. The software makes it easier to administer a blog and keep it dynamic. If you really had a lot of time on your hands, you could create a blog using HTML and static Web pages, but that’s what the blogging software helps you avoid having to do.
- There are two main types of blogging platforms:
- 1.) Paid/free hosted services such as WordPress. com, Blogger.com and TypePad.com, and
- 2.) Self-hosted software that requires a Web server and database. WordPress, Movable Type, and b2evolution are some popular self-hosted platforms. The code for these systems is very small and is mainly just a bunch of scripts and configuration files that enhance the functionality of the underlying Web server. Pretty much every major Web hosting company has support for at least one of the major self-hosted blogging platforms and even if they don’t, as long as the Web hosting platform meets the software requirements, you should be able to install the blogging software yourself.
- You can add free and paid themes or plug-ins to your blog to add additional functionality.
I chose WordPress because it looked to be the most popular of the free self-hosted blogging systems (note that WordPress.org is for the self-hosted version while WordPress.com is for the hosted service version). Since it’s popular, there are a lot of themes, plug-ins, and support for it. So far it’s been pretty easy to use, for the most part. I tinkered with it probably more than the average WordPress rookie would have, so it took me a bit longer to get everything set up close to what I envisioned the blog to be.
