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Building a Blog Site with WordPress
Blogging is something you might have heard about over the last few years. What began as personal journals online has expanded to change the way journalism, politics, and businesses are communicating. This project covers what a blog is and how to use open source software called WordPress to build your own blog. WordPress runs on a website that allows you to create blogs hosted by WordPress. Also, to run and manage your own blog, you can download the WordPress software and install it on your own web host.
What Is a Blog?
A blog is simply a web journal or log. The word blog is just a shortened form of web log. People have been writing logs and diaries for as long as there has been writing. Blogging is an electronic extension of these written words. To put it simply, a blog is a list of dated entries that have the latest entry at the top of the web page.
The subject matter can be anything - and I do mean anything. There are blogs about food, knitting, and politics, or anything that gives you the urge to write. I write a blog, my wife writes a blog, and her mother writes three blogs (I always knew my mother-law had a lot of things to say and now so does everyone else). You can write about anything. The best advice is to write about something you love. You don’t even have to be an expert. Lots of people blog about how they learn more about the things they love.
Why Should I Blog?
When you tell some folks that you write a blog or ask them about blogging, they can’t imagine why anyone would want to write a blog. They say, “I have nothing to say, “or “Who would be interested in what I have to say?” To be honest, I think everyone has something to say, and who cares if only one other person reads your blog? Actually you will be surprised who does listen to you. Blogging is a cheap and easy way to share your thoughts on anything you are interested in.
Blog Publishing
One of the web’s innovations is the ease of publishing things such as blogs. Before the Internet you had to have a printing press or convince a publisher to print something you had written. The Internet cuts out the middle man and enables anyone to publish easily. When blogging began, a blog was just a web page. This page had to be created in HTML and was a serious amount of work. So to add a new blog entry, the early blogger needed to write HTML code. This was a hassle, to say the least. Over time, websites specifically meant for bloggers began to show up. One of these was livejournal.com.
LiveJournal made writing a blog easy. You signed up for an account and were off blogging about whatever you wanted to. The problem was that, for some people, LiveJournal was too restrictive. Bloggers could not create their live journals exactly the way they envisioned them. People wanted more control.
Syndication
Ever have the feeling you are missing something that’s happening, maybe something on the web? It could be a stock tip, a big news story, or good news about your Aunt Winona. Syndication helps with that. With blogs and other sites, but predominantly with blogs, syndication enables you to have the website alert you when a blog is updated.