Blogging Fool

1 | Margo

August 21st, 2010 at 6:04 pm

I’m so new at this stuff – but willing to learn even though I’m not computer savvy – and I happened to find you via Big Geek Daddy’s List of Various links. I’m not sure you can/will help an old put “young-at-heart” person in her journey of becoming high-tech (at least a little), so if you will, clarify for me what a blog is and what a tag is. And anything else you’d like to throw my way. How do I learn everything? Just trial and error? Asking questions? Or is there a course I can take online? BGD has been so helpful, I today I ventured into your link on his site. I was going to sign up for your private newsletter, but – (1) the word “private” sort of put me off and, (2) would I understand what your newsletter covered? Well, that’s my story for the day. I’ll see if this reaches you and I get an answer. Thanks

2 | Blogging Fool

November 24th, 2010 at 4:47 pm

A blog is a content management system “CMS” whose etymology is the longer term “web log” – developed by a man who wanted to create a journal of his investigation into the works of James Joyce. Unfortunately, that man did not patent or trademark any of it and enjoyed none of the meteoric success that his platform has since grown into.

Blogs organize content and make it accessible through various cataloging methods – be that through the categories they are filed under, or tags assigned to any given article.

The blog centers around these articles or “posts” – and a primary reason for their success is that the search engines like fresh content.

The content itself is pulled from a database, it is not “hard-coded” into the design of the site like HTML pages of olde. This means, that simply by changing the visual theme of the site, of the CSS rules, you can reformat the look and layout for ALL the content on your site without ever toughing the original text or media.

Thus blogs are a Dynamic way to record, organize and display content.

Tags are way of defining the taxonomy of any given article. So for example, an article about sewing can be assigned tags specific to its content like “crafts, handiwork, hobbies, couture” and any other article that shares these tags can be recalled also when a user selects these tags.

Search engines are also aware of this correlation, so you are helping them to identify and reinforce systems of meaning that links one url to another.

This is obviously a deep topic and one can drill down seemingly forever. But suffice to say, blogs are more and more the framework underlying most sites that we now interact with online.

Everything from the New York Times to Mashable are effectively blogs.

The best way to get going is to install a custom WordPress installation for a domain you purchase (installing WordPress is easier than ever before when you sign up with a host provider like Hostmonster, Hostgator etc that offers Fantastico or SimpleScripts) and then start to familiarize yourself with the backend admin interface.

I hope that some of the article I have posted on this site, help you take it from there!