World of Blogging 1

In the world of the Internet, you must have some sort of website to publish your
identity. It could be somewhere where you can write about your work and interests.
You may also write an online diary, which would be more interesting to read.
People get to know you more than through any other media when they read about
your regular activities, your thoughts, and news about you. These sorts of diaries
are made for public viewing. People usually don't post their very personal or
confidential information here.


These online diaries are interesting fields to grab news. "Netizens" describe these
diaries with a special term "blog", which is actually derived from the word "weblog".
Blogs are places where you make yourself global. They can be of different types.
People always log news that interests them. Some write about music, some about
politics, some about sports, and so forth. Blogs are the best place if you want to
collect recent news. In real life when some natural disaster takes place or something
special happens, journalists and other people always search these blogs to be up-todate.

Recently, after the tsunami or after the bombings in London, the very first news
was published in blogs. Blogs are a world-renowned system for publishing your
content; there are several million active bloggers in this world.
Blogging History

According to Wikipedia, the largest free encyclopedia, the term "weblog" was
first used by John Barger in 1997. In May, 1999, Peter Merholz converted the word
into a new term keeping the characters the same. He made it "we blog" instead of
"weblog". He especially pointed out the term "blog". Shortly after that, this word was globally accepted both as a noun meaning a weblog and as a verb meaning "to post
in someone's blog".

One of the early blog sites "Xanga" had 100 weblogs in 1997, which surprisingly
turned into 50 million by the end of 2005. People started using blogs globally in
1999. Blogging started becoming popular when among others, Evan Williams and
Meg Hourihan from Pyra Labs created their blog publishing tool Blogger. Using
this site anyone can start blogging within minutes. The whole system was free and
very attractive. Surprisingly, Google bought the whole service in 2004. Blogger is still a free blog-publishing tool, but under the banner of Google. The words "weblog", "weblogging", and "weblogger" were inserted into The Oxford Dictionary in March,2003. This purely indicates the magic of the word "blog", which is still the favorite publishing system among millions of people.

By the end of 2001, blogging had become more popular. Everyone focused on the
possibilities and importance of blogs. Shortly after that people started researching on blogging. Even schools of journalism were very interested in the whole process.
There are other publishing systems like Wikis and CMSs, which also gained popularity in the meantime. CMS stands for Content Management System and these are generally used for publishing articles, news content, or general content in a website. They are especially built for maintaining every kind of website.

Joomla, CivicSpace, Typo3, and DotnetNuke are popular CMS software systems. There
is also a special kind of CMS that is called a Wiki. In Wikis any user can modify
contents, and all the posts are editable by general users; and usually, Wikis are
devoted to a specific audience. A Wiki tracks every change made by the users so that
you can find who changed the information and why. One of the most popular Wiki
engines is MediaWiki (http://www.mediawiki.com). A blog is also a kind of content
management system but the main purpose is to maintain the articles chronologically.

Anatomy of a Blog
Unlike blogs, a blog engine is not a single website. However, the engine consists of
different parts that are organized in a very structured way. Let us first discuss what the different types of blogs are.

Types of Blogs
In the real world, there are different types of blogs. I do not actually mean their
purpose, but rather the category of their contents. In the following sections, you will see some of them and understand their necessity.

General Blogs
When people say 'blog', they usually mean the blogs that belong to this category.
These blogs are generally text-based, but contain a lot of images and other media like audio and video. These blogs are easy to maintain, lightweight, and are very popular for their simplicity. WordPress and Drupal are general blog engines.

Photo Blogs
Photoblogs or Phlogs are special kind of blogs where a group of people or individuals share their photos collected from various sources. These blogs are
generally dedicated towards a specific audience. Most photoblogs are free. The usual
subjects of photoblogs are films, wars, herbs, natural beauty or even weird images,
and so forth; it's impossible to specify all of them. Professional photographers also
share photos through their blogs.

In photoblogs, images are the main content; we all know that a picture speaks a
thousand words. Among the photoblogs, one of the most important is Photoblogs.
org, which is developed by Brandon Stone. Photoblogs.org started with 15 blogs in
2002 and now it contains around 10,000 blogs in 40 languages!

Some photobloggers upload images in their web space using any FTP application
and directly link them through their blogs. Some bloggers use online photo
repositories like Flickr (www.flickr.com), SmugMug (http://www.smugmug.com/),
or Zoomr (www.zoomr.com) to reduce the bandwidth and also to achieve full-fledged
image administration. These days PicasaWeb (http://picasaweb.google.com/) is
also a very popular image-sharing service.

Mobile Blogs
Mobile blogs are often known as Moblogs. In this type of blogs, people access the
contents and modify them for their mobile phones or portable devices like PDAs.
Moblogs are usually developed in Japan where people have a huge number and
variety of portable devices with cameras. The term Moblog was suggested by Adam
Greenfield, who also arranged the First International Moblogging Conference
(1IMC) in July, 2003. Mobile blogs are very popular these days due to the availability of portable devices. In 2004, on Singapore's national day, a national Moblog was launched, which is the first national moblog in the world. Mobile blogs are often known as gLogs (pronounced as glogs), when they are especially used as photoblogs.

Audio Blogs
Audio blogs are especially designed MP3 blogs, whose contents are downloadable
in MP3 format. Most audio blogs are devoted to a special genre of music like rock,
classic, or jazz.
Audio bloggers also publish their content in AAC or Ogg Vorbis format, which is the most popular among *nix users. According to Wikipedia, many music bloggers publish content that may violate copyright laws. However, sometimes they manage to avoid it, since most of their contents are either old or not reissued recently and so may not cause monetary damage for the copyright holder.

Many audio bloggers also place a notice in their blogs like "If the owner objects about this post, I will immediately remove it from my blog". Many commercial music companies also maintain audio blogs and publish their music files as an advertisement to gain popularity.

Video Blogs
Often known as vlogs, video blogs are similar to audio blogs except for the type
of content they serve. Vlogs distribute video files to Netizens. These blogs became
very popular when video streaming was invented and people started getting higher
bandwidth connections than they had previously. After the marketing of Apple's
iPod or iTune, vlogs became extremely popular. In the iTune community, video
blogging is often known as "video podcasting". Some important facts from vlog
history include: Yahoo's vlogger community grew to more than 1000 members in
June, 2005; Apple declared that its iPod will play video files; and, Apple's iTune store will also serve videos. These days VlogMap.org shows vloggers from around the
world with the help of Google Earth and Google Maps.

Common Terms
When you enter the world of blogging, you may hear a lot of new terms like posts,
comments, trackbacks, and so forth. These are the parts that make a blog successful
and usable in the real world. In the following sections, we will discuss in brief what these terms mean.

Post
Posts are the core part of a blog. Every time someone writes an article in a blog,
it is known as a post. Whenever a post is made, visitors can make comments and
follow-ups. In most of the blog engines, each post has a separate URL, which is also
called permalink. With the help of different administrative panels, blog users can
make posts in their blogs. For example, if a blog is text-based, there must be a system available to write the posts. If it is a photoblog, there must be tools available to manage pictures before posting. In audio blogs, there are also facilities for streaming the audio files.

Comments
Comments are actually follow-ups made to posts by the visitors to a blog. Comments
may either be made by anonymous users or may require registration to write. These
days many blogs allow anonymous users to comment, but with a necessary spam
protection system. Comment spams are those useless automated comments that are
simply advertising a product or a website or that are totally irrelevant to a post.

These days some online marketing agencies are spreading advertisements via automated bots (bots are "robot" scripts). So if you allow anonymous commenting, be aware of comment spams.

Permalinks
Permalinks are an abbreviation for permanent links. Generally, a permalink is a
permanent URL to a specific post in your blog. To optimize blogs for search engines
and to make the URLs more readable, people use permalinks. Permalinks are short, straightforward, and easy to remember. In commercial websites with huge content, permanency of URL is a must to provide better marketing and advertising of the content.
Let me show you why permalinks are friendlier with search engines. For example,
suppose a URL is in the form http://example.com/ex.php?id=1&stat=4. When this page is linked from another site and the robots of search engines get this link, mostly they tend to skip the dynamic part of the URL. That is, the search-engine robots
browse only up to http://example.com/ex.php, which by no means delivers the exact content you wanted to show. Moreover, consider the permalink URL that refers to the same blog post: http://blog.example.com/posts/php-lookback-2005. This is more readable and user-friendly. So permalinks are of great importance to bloggers,
if they want to increase their site rank, publicity, and traffic.

Trackbacks
Trackbacks are referral links in which someone refers to your post in their blog.
Basically, trackbacks are simple notifications that are sent when someone refers to
the content of another blog. When someone trackbacks your post, a link to his or her
blog will be displayed as a comment in that article so that you will be aware of all the referrals. However, spammers are also ready to abuse this useful system to advertise their product or websites.

RSS
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS is a very strong medium to distribute the up-to-date content or news from your website to the people who subscribe to RSS in your blog. WordPress and almost every other blog engine supports auto-generation of RSS feeds. RSS works great as an advertising medium. If you are not familiar with RSS, then let me explain it briefly.

A typical blog post RSS contains a link, a title, and a small excerpt of the ten to
fifteen most recent posts. So when you make a post in your blog or someone posts a
comment, the RSS updates automatically and your RSS subscriber gets an automatic
notification about the update. They can then examine the RSS feeds and find the
latest content. These days RSS is a very popular tool, but is highly criticized. This is because there are three independent forms of RSS that are not fully compatible with each other.
They are RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and RSS 0.91. Atom is rather a more matured syndication system that takes the best from RSS and is developed in a structured way.

Tags
Tags are keywords relevant to your post through which someone may find it.
When you make a post, just find some keywords that best describe your post. These
keywords are tracked by Technorati (see below to know about Technorati) and other
indexing tools. For example, if you post about a natural disaster like an earthquake or hurricane, tag it with relevant keywords like land subsidence, earthquake, disaster, and death.
When people want to know about recent earthquakes, they may search with one of these terms, which will help your content to come in the front page.
Simply use your common sense for choosing keywords. Don't abuse this tagging feature by using irrelevant tags to increase the traffic. If you abuse, there are chances
of being banned from those indexing services and that will cause a major failure in
your blogging life.

Please note that some blog engines, for instance Blogger, do not support trackbacks
and tags unlike WordPress.

Your Friends in Blogging
Well, what if nobody knows that you have a blog or you blogged recently? Unless you are maintaining a very private blog, there is no value in writing your diaries
without a reader. The question is how to let others know about your blogs. Of course, they would not be interested to read that you had a cup of coffee this
morning or you slept eight hours last night. To inform people about your worthy
content, a search engine is your best friend. So the more frequently you publish
your content, the more the search engine robots visit your page. However, there is
something really special for bloggers.

Search engine robots or spiders are automated scripts developed by search engine companies that crawl through the websites using the navigation links found on them.
These robots just read the content of your page and add it to the search engine database by proper indexing.
Thereafter, anyone can reach your page whenever they search for any relevant keyword that was present in your page content.

Technorati is the greatest content-syndication site, which indexes your content with the help of some tags. Technorati has automated trackback URLs, which ping the users when you update your blog. So Technorati indexes your recent update immediately after you make a post on your site and displays your post in that tag category.

For example, when someone wants to know what other bloggers are thinking about AJAX, he or she goes to Technorati and searches for the term AJAX. Technorati will display all the blog posts that are indexed by it in different orders like chronologically or as per blog's authority.
So you will not only get that
information, but also you will be aware of the recent trends. We will learn the details about how to automatically ping Technorati to index your content in Chapter 4. Till then for more information visit Technorati at http://technorati.com.
Another tool that helps you to publish your content for other people is del.icio.
us. If you read it without the breaks, you will find the word "delicious" in this URL
http://del.icio.us/. del.icio.us is the largest public bookmark system operated
via the same tag mechanism that is found in Technorati except that you have to enter
your data manually. So when you make a post, just go to del.icio.us and bookmark
your content with some relevant tags so that other people can find your content. If
they find your content useful, they will also tag it and day by day it will be more
visible to the outer world.
One more tool that you must be aware of is digg. This operates with a slightly
different mechanism than the previous two. If you update your blog, just go to
http://digg.com/ and submit your news. People can then rate your news by clicking on the digg option. The more your content is digged, the more popularity you will get. When people search your content, they get the most digged content on the front page. So you gain a great publicity, if your content is really useful.

All these tools are of very high volume and crawled by search engines every day.
So if your URLs are indexed on these sites, no doubt you will get huge publicity. As
more people visit your blog, you become more successful in blogging. Meet the Giants
When you start blogging, you have several options for choosing a blog engine.
You can choose a commercial one or a free one; you can choose a tool that suits
you perfectly. Before starting a blog, just review the contents of your blog and the
audience you are writing for.

In this section, we will see some popular blog engines, review their features, and
discuss why WordPress is one of the best among them. We will also see what makes
WordPress so perfect and popular, and how WordPress can fit to your needs.
The first name that comes from the history of blogging is Blogger.com
(http://www.blogger.com). It is one of the earliest blog engines that is still available in the market. It's free to use but not open-sourced at all. You will find a huge blogger community who use Blogger.com.

Next we have the Blog City, another old but easy-to-maintain blog engine. You will
also find Yahoo 360 as another great blogging tool these days. Yahoo 360 started in
2005, and came into the spotlight because of its abundance of features. We will also
discuss MSN spaces, something from Microsoft that is similar to the Yahoo 360 blog.
You will also see some of the features of the MovableType and ExpressionEngine
blog engines.

We will focus on some of the strong competitors to WordPress like boastMachine,
Drupal, Serendipity, b2evolution, and Nucleus. Finally, we will see two other
promising alternatives, namely Textpattern and bblog.