"Blog" is a term used to describe sites that maintain an ongoing chronicle of information. A blog can feature diary-type commentary and links to articles on other websites, usually presented in reverse chronological order. Many blogs focus on a particular topic and others are more like personal journals, presenting the author's daily life and thoughts.
Blogs commonly have an archive to older articles, provide a way for people to leave comments, show a list of links to other related sites (this is sometimes called a 'blogroll') and also contain one or more feeds such as RSS, Atom or RDF files. Blogs give anyone an inexpensive platform to promote their ideas to a potential audience of the entire world and can also be useful for search engine optimisation.
Blogging platforms
There a number of blogging platforms which people use to publish their blogs on the web; many are free and many are also payable by subscription. We will now look at the platforms Blogger, Tumblr and Wordpress in a bit more detail.
Blogger (Web-Based, Free)
Blogger is a popular and free blogging service owned by Google. Blogger's big draw is its ease of use and nearly instant setup.
Blogger has an extremely easy setup process. Blogger supports drag-and-drop template editing, dynamic updating, geo-tagging for location-based blogging, and easy publication from editing tools like Google Docs, Microsoft Word, and Windows Live Writer.
Blogger supports up to 100 users, so if you grow your blog beyond single editorship you can expand without any hassle.
Tumblr (Web-Based, Free)
Tumblr acts as a fusion between a full-fledged blog and a Twitter feed. The style of blogging on a Tumblr blog is micro blogging style. Micro blogging is focused on short and frequent posts that are normally longer (or more focused on media like images or video) than Twitter updates but not as involved and formal as a regular blog post. Tumblr's style appeals to a lot of people and the ease of setup coupled with the informality of Tumblr is a winning combination for people who are not looking to commit to a blog as an involved and time-consuming project.
Wordpress (Web-Based, Free)
Wordpress is one of the most popular open source blogging platforms. As a Wordpress user, you have the option of setting up a Wordpress blog on your own server (for free) or creating a Wordpress-hosted blog at WordPress.com. Thanks to an enormous community of followers and developers, Wordpress has a wide variety of themes and features that can be used to customise your blog page.
There is millions of plug-ins that offer a wide range of other features however they are are not available to free Wordpress blog users at workdpress.com. Plug-ins only work with self-hosted blogs using the software provided from wordpress.org and they are not that easy to set up and configure if you are not very tech savvy. However, if Toddler Holiday later chooses to host its own blog, it will be able to install many plugins for example 'Wickett Twitter Widget' which enables you to display tweets from a Twitter account in the sidebar of your blog or comment. This can be useful for further publicising tweets involving late availability and special offers to a targeted audience.
Wordpress is a scalable solution that allows you to do everything from maintaining a single blog with a single user to an entire stable of blogs with multiple users all overseen by a primary administrator.
Blogging terminology
Archives
A blog is also a good way to keep track of articles on a site. A lot of blogs feature an archive based on dates, author or alphabetically and many more. The ability to organize and present articles in a composed fashion is much of what makes blogging a popular personal publishing tool.
Feeds
A Feed is a function of special software that allows "Feed readers" to access a site automatically looking for new content and then post updates about that new content to another site. This provides a way for users to keep up to date with the latest information posted on their favorite blogging sites. Some Feeds include RSS ("Rich Site Summary" or "Really Simple Syndication"), Atom or RDF files.
Blogroll
A blogroll is a list where you link to the blogs that you read frequently. The blogroll is often in a "sidebar" on the page or featured as a dedicated separate web page. The links in a blogroll are usually links to other blogs with similar interests. Wordpress' built-in Links Manager allows you to add and manage links effortlessly so users do not have to depend on a third party for creating and managing their blogroll.
Syndication
A feed is a machine readable (usually XML) content publication that is updated regularly. Many weblogs publish a feed (usually RSS, but also possibly Atom and RDF etc.). There are tools out there that call themselves "feedreaders". They keep checking specified blogs to see if they have been updated, and when the blogs are updated, they display the new post, and a link to it, with an excerpt of the post.
Each feed contains items that are published over time. When checking a feed, the feedreader is actually looking for new items. New items are automatically discovered and downloaded for you to read. Just so you don't have to visit all the blogs you are interested in. All you have to do with these feedreaders is to add the link to the RSS feed of all the blogs you are interested in. The feedreader will then inform you when any of the blogs have new posts in them. Most blogs have these "Syndication" feeds available for the readers to use.
Managing Comments
One of the most exciting features of blogging tools are the comments. This highly interactive feature allows users to comment upon article posts and link to your posts and comment on and recommend them. These are known as trackbacks and pingbacks .
Comment Spam
Comment spam refers to useless comments (or trackbacks, or pingbacks) to posts on a blog. These are often irrelevant to the context value of the post. They can contain one or more links to other websites or domains. Spammers use comment spam as a medium to get higher page rank for their domains in Google in order to obtain a high ranking in search results for an existing website.
Spammers are relentless; because there can be substantial money involved, they work hard at their "job." They even build automated tools (robots) to rapidly submit their spam to the same or multiple weblogs. Many webloggers, especially beginners, sometimes feel overwhelmed by comment spam.
There are solutions, though, to avoiding Comment Spam. Wordpress includes many tools for combating comment spam to make it manageable.
Pretty Permalinks
Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to refer to your article (or section), or how you might send a link to your story in an e-mail message. Because others may link to your individual postings, the URL to that article shouldn't change. Permalinks are intended to be permanent (valid for a long time).
"Pretty" Permalinks is the idea that URLs are frequently visible to the people who click them, and should therefore be crafted in such a way that they make sense, and not be filled with incomprehensible parameters. The best Permalinks are "hackable," meaning a user might modify the link text in their browser to navigate to another section or listing of the weblog. For example, this is how the default Permalink to a story might look in a default Wordpress installation:
/index.php?p=423
How is a user to know what "p" represents? Where did the number 423 come from?
In contrast, here is a well-structured, "Pretty" Permalink which could link to the same article because after publishing a post, you can edit your permalink:
New pretty permalink:
/2010/05/23/my-toddler-holiday/
One can easily guess that the Permalink includes the date of the posting, and the title, just by looking at the URL. One might also guess that hacking the URL to be /archives/2010/05/23 would get a list of all the postings from May of 2010 which gets your past blogs more readers.
Blog by email
Wordpress blogging tools offer the ability to email your posts directly to your blog, all without direct interaction through the blogging tool interface. Using email, you can now send in your post content to a pre-determined email address and your post is published.
Excerpt
Excerpts are condensed summaries of your blog posts, with blogging tools being able to handle these in various ways. In Wordpress, excerpts can be specifically written to summarize the post, or generated automatically by using the first few paragraphs of a post or using the post up to a specific point, assigned by you.
Plugins
Plugins are cool bits of programming scripts that add additional functionality to your blog. These are often features which either enhance already available features or add extra features them to your blog site. Wordpress offers simple and easy ways of adding Plugins to your blog but it is not available on a free Wordpress blog. If you are hosting your own blog and using the software from Wordpress.org, you can use plugins. From the Administration Panel, there is a Plugin Page. Once you have uploaded a Plugin to your Wordpress plugin directory, activate it from the Plugins Management SubPanel, and sit back and watch your Plugin work. Not all Plugins are so easily installed, but Wordpress Plugin authors and developers make the process as easy as possible. It is best to carefully follow the authors guidelines as well as WordPress.
Blog Search Engines:
Several blog search engines are used to search blog contents, such as Bloglines, BlogScope, and Technorati. Technorati, which is among the most popular blog search engines, provides current information on both popular searches and tags used to categorize blog postings.
Wordpress Sign-up Process
We have created a free Wordpress account for ToddlerHoliday via www.wordpress.com. The account is called toddlerholidayfrance.wordpress.com however you can change how your username appears therefore it has been modified to simply 'toddlerholiday'. From the Toddler Holiday France Wordpress page you can take advantage of a wide variety of functions from editing your profile and managing comments, to adding links and viewing stats.
Wordpress is great as it provides a number of tools for editing and for image management. It allows you to easily manage your content with a familiar editing interface. You don't need to learn HTML - just the skills you have already acquired using word processors like Microsoft Word. You can easily enter format text using the rich editor if you're familiar with any word processing packages.
A view of Wordpress when adding a new post
Below is an overview of the Toddler Holiday's Home Page on Wordpress. You can easily manage your account using the 'My Account' tab and other tabs above and on the side of the page.
The Wordpress Dashboard:
The Wordpress dashboard gives you a one stop overview of what is happening on your blog; you can catch up on news, see the latest comments, check how popular your content is, see who has been linking to your blog, refer to blogs you have been preparing, view stats and moderate your content. You can configure the dashboard to the way that you want your Wordpress to work best for you and your needs.
Below is a partial overview of Toddler Holiday's Dashboard at present:
This can be modified to your needs in time to improve management of your blog.
Using Wordpress and managing your blog page:
You can manage your webpage from the options available to you on the left hand sidebar of the page. The sidebar/tabs appear as below:
From the sidebar menus, you can quickly access options regarding adding posts, manage post categories and tags, manage your library, add new links, link weblinks to categories, add or manage comments, view ratings and polls.
Toddler Holiday can choose between the many customisation features and tools to improve its blogs and manage them more easily from the following tabs.
Appearance: You can browse themes, choose header pictures, modify font styles and drag and drop widgets which you can activate or deactivate from your WordPress page.
Users: You can also add users and give them roles such as contributor, author, administrator so that you can have multiple users working on your blog.
Tools: You can also use various tools such as blog email where you can email a blog and it will automatically be published. You can also enter your meta key 'content' value to verify your blog with Google Webmaster Tools.
Settings: You have the power to change a number of settings from all aspects of your blog platform for example, your site tag, your writing settings, your privacy settings, comment settings and notifications to name but just a few.
Publicising Blogs using Wordpress:
You can choose to automatically publicise a blog as you publish it by linking your blog page to your twitter and Facebook sites. This is very convenient and time effective. You can also view stats here of your blog. These are very in-depth and show you statistics such as which search terms and search engines have given you traffic, which other websites have given you traffic, how many clicks you have received and you can even see graphical illustrations of the activity of your blog by day, week and month.
Recommendations for Toddler Holiday:
Toddler holiday should use a free Wordpress hosted blog to post content that would be of interest to its target audience, for example, family holiday related content and parenting related content. This will improve the search engine optimisation of the website and has the potential to create valuable back links for the website.
Blogging about topics in an informative way as well as expressing your own personal experience may work to establish the author as a kind of toddler-holiday guru. The effects of this could be extremely valuable for the Toddler Holiday brand as well as the SEO of the website. It may lead to the creation of many connections with other related websites and blogs, it may build the toddler holiday name and also created a cloud of connections around the toddler holiday website for SEO as more backlinks are created.
Toddler holiday can also choose to automatically publish their blogs to their twitter and Facebook and this is highly recommended as this can provide great traffic opportunities for both the blog and the toddler holiday website alike.
