SOME BLOG CATEGORIES HELP YOU UNDERSTANDING BETTER YOUR PLATFORM

SOME BLOG CATEGORIES HELP YOU UNDERSTANDING BETTER YOUR PLATFORM

Some blog programs allow the blogger to assign categories to blog entries. These categories are listed in a sidebar, so that visitors can restrict their reading to a category of interest. It’s not unusual forone entry to be tagged in multiple categories. Comments are written by visitors to your blog and are presented below your entry on that entry’s unique page. On the index page, a Comments link sends visitors to that unique page, scrolled down to the first comment. Many blog programs allow the comments function to be turned off, so visitors cannot talk back. Some blog experts believe that the presence of comments is a defining feature of a Weblog.

TrackBacks are related to comments but are trickier to understand. Chapter 3 makes TrackBacks absolutely clear. For now, know that TrackBacks offer a way to put a link to your blog entry on someone else’s blog. TrackBacks link blogs together in the macrologue.

A final element common to most blogs is the syndication link, which can take several forms and is worthy of a thorough discussion. That discussion occurs which dives into the important topics of RSS (really simple syndication) and newsreaders. The take-away point for now is that many people read blogs in newsreaders, not by visiting the blog sites. Newsreaders pull the content of many blogs into one window. Within a newsreader, each blog is called a feed. These newsreaders are mostly free and can be standalone programs that you download to your computer or Web-based services that you visit from any computer.

Making your blog’s content available as a feed is crucial. Fortunately, this fairly technical method of distributing blog entries is effortlessly handled for you by nearly all blog software. Using RSS and other syndication formats has become so simple that this book doesn’t spend any space explaining how to create syndication links from scratch.