Brief Introduction to Blogging
Blogs and bloggers are everywhere on the Internet these days. Blogs are essentially diaries, with the latest entry on top. If you are curious about blogging, the best place to start is to find a few blogs you like to read and then keep up with them via an aggregator (also called a reader).
First, you need to find blogs about things that interest you. There are all sorts on many topics, but you can find a list of blogs about needlepoint on either of my blogs, the addresses of which are at the end of this message. If you want to find cooking blogs or dog blogs or political blogs or whatever, use Google which has a search engine that just searches for blogs.
http://blogsearch.google.com/
Ok, now you are addicted and there are 10 blogs you like to read. What next? This is where a reader comes in. A reader is software that checks the blogs you follow and let you know when a new entry is posted to any of them.
Some browsers like Firefox and Safari have built-in readers and there are a ton of widgets that you can add to Yahoo, etc. that will collect RSS, Atom and other types of feeds but in a less organized form than readers do. Feeds are little programs that collect update information on one blog or website. So you have a new blog entry collected by a feed which can be collected in large groups by a readers (This is very simplified, you understand.) The main readers I’ve used or had recommended are Bloglines, Google Reader and NetVibes.
They all work the same way. You go to their website and set up an account, then copy/paste your favorite blog URL addresses into an area there. As you copy each address, you may need to click that every recent entry from that blog has been read to get yourself up to date for new feeds. Once you are done, then you just check back at the website and log yourself in for your feeds. NetVibes has a widget you can add to your browser home page. The widget (widgets are tiny mini programs you can copy/paste into larger programs like browsers) will make results show up on your home page of your browser so you don’t have to go any place else to check on new blog entries. NetVibes seems to have complex tools that a more tech-oriented audience might enjoy learning to use on hundreds of blogs they follow, but since we have both novices and experts among the needlepoint world, I mention both types.
Here are three reader websites to get started. There are MANY more.
http://www.bloglines.com/
http://www.google.com/reader/view/
http://www.netvibes.com/
None of this is really hard to set up but it all takes some playing around to make it work, and some things don’t work with non-Windows machines or with certain browsers. This article will help some, but the best thing to do is jump in and try some things. If you have a Gmail account already, the Google Reader is really easy to access when you log in to read your emails.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/03/30/the-state-of-online-feed-readers/
Next time I’ll point you to information about setting up your own blog.
Jane/Chilly Hollow
blogging at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/chillyhollow
with mirror blog at http://chillyhollownp.blogspot.com
Main blog at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/chillyhollow
