Chapter 18

Blogging: The World Reads Your Diary

In This Chapter

Reading other people’s blogs, or online diaries

Commenting on other people’s blogs (politely, we hope)

Subscribing to a blog so that you know when it has a new posting

Making your own blog

Posting to your blog

Diaries are as old as writing. (We made up that statement, but it may well be true. Perhaps you can do some Internet research and let us know whether it is.) However, diaries that every single person on the entire Internet can read are a more recent invention. Not many people have always dreamed of publishing their diaries, but lots of people want to write regular columns where they can express their opinion, tell stories, or post pictures. Blogs have made that expression possible, easy, and free.

If you want to look at or post photos or video instead of prose, you can use a website like Tumblr.

If you’re not an enthusiastic and voluminous writer and you want to post tiny articles or journal entries, microblogs were invented for you – Twitter is the best-known microblog. See Chapter 11 for how to read and post on Twitter.

What’s in a Blog?

A weblog, usually abbreviated as blog, is a public online diary where someone posts more or less regular updates. A blog uses software that lets you easily post entries by using your web browser — no additional software is needed. You can even post updates by email or from your cellphone.

Most blogs are updated frequently by one author and contain short, dated entries, as in a diary, with the newest ones at the top. Other blogs are more complex, with multiple topics or pictures as well as or instead of words, but they retain the idea of relatively short entries, updated relatively often. Figure 18-1 shows the political blog of a friend of ours, Doug Muder, who posts once a week at weeklysift.blogspot.com.

The best blogs offer cutting-edge journalism and commentary and brilliant, witty, sparkling writing, whereas the worst disprove the old cliché that a million monkeys at a million typewriters would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. If you search Google (google.com) for the word blog or weblog and some topic words that are of interest to you, you’ll invariably find someone blogging away at it. But keep reading to find out better ways to discover and organize the blogs you read.

As blogs have become more popular, many websites have added blogs to post news, gossip, or behind-the-scenes stories. Every New York Times columnist (at www.nytimes.com) has a blog — go to nytimes.com/blogs to see a list. Some sites show the latest blog posting or two in a prominent spot, and you can click a link to see older posts.

How to read a blog

Reading a blog is easy because blogs are just web pages. Point your browser at the home page of the one you’re interested in and read it. (Bet you thought it would be more complicated than that.) If you want to see more information about a particular story, click the link in the story. Scroll down to read older stories.

Reading one blog is like eating only one potato chip, which never happens. When you find one blog, it usually has links to other blogs. If you search for one blog on a particular topic, you find a dozen blogs on that subject, and before you know it, you’re mired deep in the swamps of Blogistan, with far too many interesting blogs to keep track of.

Which blogs should you read? It depends on what you are interested in. Try using Google or another search website to search for a topic that interests you plus the word “blogs” and see what comes up. Here are few blogs we like:

• Cool Tools, at kk.org.cooltools, posts a description of one useful or intriguing tool each day.
• Love and Lemons, at loveandlemons.com, about cooking with seasonal produce, by a couple in Austin, Texas
• PostSecret, at postsecret.com, where people mail postcards (or virtual postcards) with their darkest secrets
• Sportsologist, at sportsologist.com, about the business and statistics of U.S. sports
• The Weekly Sift (weeklysift.com) is a weekly round-up of news analysis from a thoughtful liberal perspective.

Because blogs change frequently (at least they’re supposed to), you might want to bookmark your favorite ones in your browser so that you can find them again. As you find more blogs, you soon find your bookmark folder and your brain exploding from trying to keep track of them.

More photos than text

If you are looking for photos and videos rather than text, Tumblr.com is worth looking at. Go to tumblr.com and enter a topic into the search box.

Lots of blogs, on and off of Tumblr, are mainly photos or videos. For a laugh, check out these sites:

• FailBlog, at www.failblog.org, with videos of epic failures (a favorite of teenagers everywhere)
• Cheezburger, at www.cheezburger.com, with silly photos, comics, and videos.

Commenting on blogs

Many blogs allow comments, so you can read what other people thought about the post you just read, and you can post your own thoughts. If a blog allows comments, they usually appear below the blog. To post a comment, you may need to create an account and log in. Some blogs don’t display comments until the blog owner reads and approves them. Sometimes the comments are the most interesting part of a blog!

Curated super-blogs

There are so many blogs with so much content that sites arose to collect the best material in one place. Some of the curated sites have stables of authors to write for them, like these super-blogs:

• Boing Boing, at www.boingboing.net, for eclectic technogossip
• Business Insider, at www.businessinsider.com
• Engadget, at www.engadget.com, for news about cool gadgets
• The Huffington Post, at www.huffingtonpost.com or www.huffpost.com, which expanded to become AOL’s online newspaper
• Mashable, at www.mashable.com, with news about technology, media, and web culture
• TMZ, at www.tmz.com, for celebrity gossip
• Wonkette, at www.wonkette.com, for Washington, DC, political gossip

Subscribing to blogs

Luckily, you can subscribe to blogs so that you don’t have to remember to return to each blog website to read the latest postings. When you subscribe to a blog, the new entries arrive on your computer automatically, so you don’t have to check the blog website. You can find two kinds of blog subscriptions: RSS and email.

RSS blog subscriptions

An RSS feed is one way to subscribe to a blog and receive new postings automagically. (RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.) An RSS feed is a special web address (URL) that usually ends with .rss. When you’re reading a blog in your browser, look for a Subscribe link or RSS link, which should display information about the site’s RSS feed. Some blogs use a URL at feedburner.google.com for their feeds. Atom is the successor to RSS; any Atom feed works like an RSS feed.

The system you use to read your RSS subscriptions is an aggregator, although almost no one uses the term. Look for web-based aggregators, or websites that track and show you all your favorite blogs. You can go to Feedly (feedly.com), create an account, and read your blog subscriptions there. If you use My Yahoo! (my.yahoo.com) to create your own web start page, you can add your subscriptions to the page. On the blog website, click the Subscribe or RSS link, choose My Yahoo!, and click Add to My to confirm. (Not all blogs work with My Yahoo!.)

Aggregators in your browser

You can install aggregator add-ins to most web browsers which create pseudo-web pages that show you what’s new in your RSS feeds. We like Slick RSS for Chrome (do a Google search for “Slick RSS” to find it.) There are dozens of aggregators for Firefox with different usage styles; visit addons.mozilla.org and search for “RSS”.

Email blog subscriptions

We use a system that alerts us to new information — it’s called email. Rather than bother with RSS feeds and aggregator sites, we’d rather just get an email message when our favorite blogs have a new posting. Many, but not all, blogs enable you to subscribe to receive email notifications. If yours don’t, you can go to BlogTrottr (www.blogtrottr.com) and sign up to receive email notifications for as many blogs as you want for free, accompanied by ads. You cut and paste the RSS feed address and your email address, and you’re all set.

Writing Your Own Blog

After you’re comfortable reading other people’s blogs, how about starting your own? People read blogs for their brilliant, witty, sparkling content. Sparkling is hard, and sparkling regularly is exhausting. If you start your own blog, try blogging for a while on your own before telling all your friends about it. Otherwise: “It was okay at the beginning, but now, big yawn.”

Many blogging sites accept text, photos, and even video as part of your blog. You don’t have to decide in advance what kind of material you’ll include. If you lead an interesting life and want a way to let your friends and family know what’s up, a blog may be perfect for you.

Finding a place for your blog

Many big blog sites let you blog away without having to install anything. These sites offer a basic usable blog for free. Some also have extra-cost add-ons that they hope you’ll use. For reasons that will shortly become apparent if you read this entire section, we suggest that most of our users try Blogger.

Here are the two most popular blog-hosting sites:

Blogger

  www.blogger.com

Also known as Blogspot, Blogger is part of the Google empire. After you create an account, you can add and edit blog entries at the website, customize it in any of a zillion ways, and publish your blog. Blog entries can include photos and videos. You can even post text and pictures from your mobile phone.

Blogger is remarkably uninterested in asking for your money. As far as we can figure out, its reason for existence is mostly to be a place for people to display Google ads. That’s fine — it’s a nice site, and the ads are entirely optional.

WordPress

  www.wordpress.com

WordPress can provide you with a customizable blog for free. Because its software is widely used, lots of plug-ins allow you to mix photos from Flickr, posts from Twitter, and other kinds of information directly into your blog. You can also create nonjournal pages, such as an About Me page. WordPress can do more than just blogs; it’s become a full-fledged content management system (CMS) capable of displaying all kinds of websites. Refer to WordPress For Dummies, by Lisa Sabin-Wilson (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.), for more information, or go to www.wordpress.org.

Going postal

When you’re ready to post to your blog an article, a diary entry, a story, or a rant, you have a number of options:

• Use your web browser. Go to the blog’s website in your browser and click the Create Post or New Post link. Type your article, or cut and paste it from your word processor. Most blog sites allow you to preview your posting before publishing for the world to see.
• Use your smartphone. You can install an app on your iPhone or Android or other type of smartphone that enables you to post on your blog. WordPress, Blogger, and Tumblr all have apps that enable you to post directly from your phone or tablet.
• Mail it in. At some blog sites in this list, you can email articles to a special address. In Blogger, you click Settings and then Email to set up the address. On WordPress, go to Dashboard > My Blogs, choose Screen Options, and enable the Post by Email option.

For more ways to blog, get Blogging For Dummies (written by Amy Lupold Bair and Susannah Gardner; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.).

Illustrating your blog

Text is so 20th century. (Actually, it’s more 15th century, but who’s counting?) If you find text constraining, just about every blog site, including the ones we describe in the preceding section, lets you include pictures as part of your blog, often uploaded directly from your mobile phone.

For example, when you’re creating a new post on Blogger or WordPress, you can add a picture or video to your post. You upload it and there it is, in your blog! You may need to use photo editing software to crop or resize your photo, or reduce its size if it’s enormous.

Blogging in song

If you’re a storyteller or musician, or you just have a lot to say, you can post your digital recording on the web as a podcast, which is an audio blog. You can upload any audio file you created yourself, containing music, speech, or any sounds you like, and other people can subscribe to it, just like on a blog. Chapter 14 describes how to find and subscribe to podcasts.

One way to set up a podcast is to make a blog and post audio files on it. Several websites will host your podcast for free or for a small monthly fee. Here are two:

• PodBean, at www.podbean.com, is free for personal podcasting, for the first 100MB of audio files. To store more files, you need to pay a modest monthly fee.
• Liberated Syndication, at www.libsyn.com, offers accounts starting at $5 per month.

After you have a podcast, be sure to submit it to the iTunes Store so that people who use iTunes can easily subscribe: Run the free iTunes program (which is useful even if you don’t own an i-Anything), click iTunes Store, click Podcasts, and click Submit a Podcast. (See Chapter 14 to find out how to use iTunes.)

For details on creating and maintaining a podcast, read Podcasting For Dummies (written by Tee Morris, Chuck Tomasi, Evo Terra, and Kreg Steppe; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.).

Another possibility is to upload your videos to YouTube, and then blog about them, with a text description and a link to the video. (See “Putting the ‘You’ in YouTube” in Chapter 14.) Or to be even slicker, you can “embed” the YouTube video as a sub-window in your blog post. To do that, visit the YouTube page for your video, click the “Share” icon under the video, then the Embed link that appears. It will show you a box containing a line of web HTML code. Copy and paste that code into your blog post, and your video will appear there.