K-State Libraries - Digital Initiatives

Digital Initiatives

Blogging 101

Blog: Short for weblog, a Website that is updated regularly by means of posts, typically in reverse-chronological order. The main body of a blog generally consists of posts and comments, with links and other tidbits found in the left and/or right sidebars.
Blogger: Someone who maintains a blog. Also a Google-owned service (blogger.com) that offers free blogs to anyone.
Comment: A response to a post on a blog. Think of commenters as the peanut gallery, offering responses, rebuttals, etc. to a post.
Feed: Also known as RSS, the posts on a blog, tidily wrapped in XML, that can be read via a feedreader and/or integrated into other Web pages.
Feedreader: This is a program or service that can "read" RSS feeds from blogs and display them. Examples on online services that do this are My Yahoo, Google homepage, and Bloglines. There are also many PC and Mac feedreading programs, among them FeedReader, FeedDemon, and RSSReader. Mail programs such as Thunderbird can also read feeds, as can the Firefox and Opera Web browsers.
Post: The main content of a blog. Generally, only the owner and invited authors can post on a blog; others may only comment where permitted. Posts typically have a date header and are followed by other links, such as permalink, a category listing, and/or a link to the comment function.
RSS: Stands for either RDF Site Summary, Rich Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication depending on whom you ask. The last defintion is the most helpful. It's a super-easy way to syndicate your site, i.e.- let users read it when and where they want, much like syndicated television in a way. All one needs is the URL of a blog's feed in order to use RSS.
XML: Short for eXtensible Markup Language, in a nutshell it's a coding language that allows you to take any content, enclose it in HTML-like open and closing tags, and literally do 101 different things with it. In the blogging world, it allows any feedreader to pick up the contents of a blog (via RSS) and display them.