Lesson one of the Blog School throws you in at the deep end and might leave you with a lot of buzz words rattling around your brain and a big “Now What?” feeling, so this follow up lesson explores a few of the concepts introduced already and starts to look at blogging in general so as you branch out and look at resources on your own you will be more comfortable with the terms you come across.
Understanding Your New Blog
Once you actually have a blog you are faced with a lot of new information that can seem a little overwhelming at first glance, luckily there is very little you actually need to know to get started and you can start with just a few simple steps ignoring the bits you don’t understand until you are ready for them.
Info: Posts, Entries and Blogs
There are number of different terms used interchangeably when you add a new item to your blog, most commonly you will see it referred to as writing a post, or writing an entry, some times prefixing with a blog so it becomes blog post and blog entry. In the early days blog was used to describe the entry it’s self, as a singular term but common sense has prevailed in favor of more meaningful terms.
Info: What are Themes?
Themes control how your blog looks to the people reading it. Everything from colours and fonts to the layout of the columns and menus, to more advanced options specific to an individual theme. You can change your theme as often as you want and the actual content (Your posts and comments) remains them same. We’ll look at selecting a theme in the next lesson.
Info: What are Plugins?
Plugins are extra features that you can install on your blog to extend its functionality. Some of them work in the background and do things like protect you from spam, where others let you easily drop extra content to your blog like linking to other sites like Facebook or Twitter. In later lessons we will introduce plugins one or two at a time to help you evolve your blog. If you use a free blog provider they will give you a preinstalled selection of plugins but you can not install your own.
Info: What is a Blog Feed, RSS Feed or Atom Feed
Your blog feed provides a way to expose what is been written on your blog to a wider audience using tools that read the feed know as Feed Aggregators. WordPress automatically generates your feed for you so you don’t need to worry about that for now, and we will look at how you can use feeds from other sites to make keeping up to date on other blogs easier, or display content from other blogs on your own.
What Makes You a Blogger
The fact you now own a blog in it’s self makes you a blogger, but there is more to been a blogger then simply posting away on your own small corner of the Internet, the main advantage of blogging is connecting with other people who share a common interest, and reading other blogs, commenting on them, and linking from your blog to others all form vitial connections across the Internet and help you establish an identify on the Internet.
Blogger Tip: Don’t Just Link, Add Value
Linking to other blogs when you see an entry you like is a great way to bring people to your site as each mention creates a Trackback, however to keep people interested rather then simply saying “I like this” you should offer your own thoughts going beyond what the original covered, or even disagreeing so the conversation extends between the two blogs and over time grows your network of readers who see a benefit in reading your posts.
Info: What is a Trackback?
When you reference another blog on yours, your blogging software with automatically let the blog you are talking about know you have mentioned it. The process is called a Trackback, it happens automatically so you don’t need to worry about it too much just yet.
The Blogsphere
You’ll see the word Blogsphere used frequently as you learn more about blogs and blogging, as you might be able to guess it refers collectively to blogs, the bloggers who write them and extends to related technologies and sites such as Technorati or Twitter.
Info: What is Technorati?
You’ve already seen the web site Technorati mention a few times by this point, so you might be wondering what they do. They offer a blog specific search service and community tools to help bloggers promote their blogs and are a very popular way to bring traffic into your blog. We’ll look at setting yourself up on Technorati in a latter lesson.
Info: What are Social Networks and Social Media?
Social Media and Social Networks are the terms used to describe not just the Blogsphere but any site or technology that enables people to form communities on the Internet and beyond using mobile phones and devices like the iPhone or games consoles with community features. Facebook, Myspace, Flickr and StumbleUpon all fall under the category of Social Networks.
Blogger Tip: Developing Your Personal Brand
One of the topics you will see talked about a lot as you expand your reading about running blogs is the idea of creating a personal brand, this means maintaining a level of consistency between different Social Networks so at a basic level doing things like using the same Usernames on each site and using the available tools to cross link from one site to another networking your various Internet identities together.
