What is a blog?

August 5th, 2005 · No Comments

A blog is a form of publishing a website whose features benefit both the publisher (me) and the reader (you). When you come to a blog, you will always find the most recent post at the very top. This is called reverse chronological order. On the side is a list of recent posts as well as an archive of posts by date. The other benefit to the reader is something called RSS. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” It allows a person to use something called a news aggregator to subscribe to multiple blogs and read them in one place, rather then following bookmarks or typing in a URL to get to the blog. If you’d like to subscribe to the RSS feed for this site, click the link to the right that says “syndicate this site (XML)” and copy the url into your news aggregator.

The benefit to the publisher (me) is that instead of learning HTML to design a webpage, there are web-interfaces that allow publishing to be done by filling out a form and clicking “publish.” This has opened the door for millions of people to publish their stories, rants, gossip and opinions for the world to see. If you would like to start a blog, there are free services like blogger and paid services like tyepad which hosts my blogs.