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These days everybody seems to have a blog. Some are really
fun, while others are bordering on the fine line of disturbing.
Now that you have a cheap and easy to maintain account,
or you plan on getting another, what better use would their
be than jumping on the blogging bandwaggon? I'm not going
to cover here all the different ways, engines, and scripts
there is available to help you blog. What I am willing to
cover are some things about it that are some what scary.
Such things that would confuse the average user from leaping
into this voyeuristic act. Hopefully this will lead you
in the right direction and calm some nerves along the way.
Have you ever been to a site, and they say you can have
their "RSS" feeds? The definition of RSS has been
argued by many before me, but lets just say it stands for
"Really Simple Syndication". It allows your readers
to take that address and put it into a news reader program,
or allows them to even put your headlines on their blog.
There are a million and one other uses for the really simple
syndication feeds, but I won't go into all of them here.
Another pain of blogging is the act of rebuilding every
time you change something on your layout or write a new
entry. Many people don't see the point, because once they
save it, they think it should automatically be shown. This
is not always the case though. Usually if you say, make
a change to the links page on your site you must rebuild
at least that one page to bring the new content into the
people's eye. When designing a new layout for a blog, this
can be really time-consuming because you have to change
the page, rebuild the page, then view the page. Of course
you could change all the pages then rebuild, but I'm a nit-picker
who likes to do one thing at a time so overall this will
take a more than a few hours from your day. When I start
working on a new layout I like to have my coffee handy and
my sugar-filled pastries-a-plenty.
Next question you might have to ask yourself is, "What's
with all this CSS stuff?". CSS stands for Cascading
Style Sheet. Think of it as the brain of your layout, telling
the code what color to put where, and how wide that left
menu should be. CSS is not limited to blogging though, you
could use it on any number of different types of webpages,
but that's another column for another time. Taking the time
to learn about CSS, which these days can be done as quickly
as a search in Google, is worth it for me, because now instead
of changing a color on fourty-seven different pages, I can
change them all by just editing one single spot in the CSS.
Now that you have a blog; how do you wish to organize your
previous saved entries that you love and cherish so much?
This is done through archiving. Now with most blogging engines
out there today you have the choice of archiving by the
day, week, and month or you could archive by the category
that post fits into. For the average user I would say archiving
monthly is the way to go. You may also choose if you wish
for each entry to have it's own individual archive which
I also give the thumbs up and the green light for as well.
That way if you wish you point to a specific post in your
past, you have a definite location instead of telling somebody,
"Oh look at the twenty-second post in September".
Templates are something that should be easy to understand,
but the average new user is scared of. Taking a look at
one, you see a lot of familiar and friendly HTML, but then
you see some disturbing code that scares you away. While
some of this might be CSS markers, as was mentioned above,
but most of it will be tags specifically generated for the
blogging engine of your choice. Most blogging engine manuals
will explain these tags, and if you plan on spending lots
of time inside the "guts" or code of your blog,
it's all worth learning. Most template sets have a main
page for your index, a main archives page then it divides
into little sub-categories depending on your archiving choices.
I know what I'm about to say will scare most people out
of their chairs but read the manuals! 99.9% of what you
are confused about are explained pretty well in these text
documents that accompany your blogging engine of choice.
Also do not be afraid to ask for help. Most blogging engine's
websites have help forums for you to ask more experienced
users your questions.
It's also worth mentioning that Total Choice Web Hosting
doesn't allow Greymatter blogs due to some technical issues,
but any other choices should be fine as long as you are
dedicated to learning the ins and outs about them. So what's
stopping you now? Go out there and tell the whole world
how much you hated your bad day. Believe me, you'll feel
better afterwards.
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