What is a blog?
Posted February 7th, 2008
What is a blog?
The word blog is short for weblog (web log). It is literally a ‘log’ of a persons thoughts, opinions and ideas. They are usually written on a particular subject and updated on a regular basis.
Blogs are arranged in chronological order with the most recent ‘post’ (or entry) at the top of the main page and the older entries towards the bottom.
The main page of a blog will usually only feature a limited number of posts, perhaps the previous 5 or so. As a post gets older it moves down the main page every time a new post is added until eventually it moves off the page and into the Archive.
Archive
The archive is what makes blogs so powerful, over time they can build up into a huge resource. Previous posts stored in the archive can usually be accessed in 2 ways from the sidebar menu. Under the heading ‘Archive’ you can find previous posts based on the date they were written or under the ‘Category’ heading you can access posts based on the category of their content.
Comments
Most blogs allow comments to be added to each individual post. A link at the bottom of each post will allow you to read or add to the comments.
Blogs are enhanced by RSS feeds or ‘news feeds’ which allow you to ’subscribe’ to the posts. If you are not familiar with RSS please see our next blog post on the subject.
