Features of Blogging

When it comes to actually blogging and setting up your blog, you need to understand the features of a blog. Knowing and understanding these features can help you understand both what the blog is and how it works.

This will help you to understand how people make money off it and how you can do the same.

Below is an explanation of different parts of a standard blog and the features therein.

Posting Structure

Do you understand the posting structure of the blog and how it works? Each entry is referred to as a “post”. Posts may also be called entries or articles. They may be made on a daily basis or weekly, bimonthly, monthly, etc. The way you enter your blog post varies according to what type of blog service you are using. Many have a direct entry text box where you simply type in what you want to say. You don’t have to know any special coding information. Some blogs have what is called WYSIWYG editors. This stands for “what you see is what you get” and it means easy text entry no matter who you are.

Most blog sites and interfaces have HTML input as well for those of you who enjoy working with code and would like to enter your blogs this way. There are also different formats for listing links, photos, etc. Most work the same way as text. You have the option to either enter as HTML or enter in the WYSIWYG editors.

Interactivity

Another great thing about blogs is that they are interactive. This is one thing that made them so popular. People have the opportunity to respond to what they read. You can post comments to the blog when you read it which are often shown instantly. There are some cases where the blog owner may use a spam filter or blocker and your comment will have to be reviewed first. The comments are usually found at the end of the post. People feel great about the fact that they can add their own thoughts and opinions and communicate with other people that are reading the blog. This is also a great way for advertisers to find out how the readers feel about something.

The archive feature

Archiving is another great feature of blogging. Most blogs have this option so that you can archive your posts by categories and date. If you find a blog that you like, you can look back on past entries. In fact, most blogs have an archive that is searchable for you to easily bring up certain topics or dates and read the entries.

The regular blog will have features set up so that after a certain number of days or certain number of blog entries posted, the older entries will roll off the main page and become archived. There are also other features that are usually built into the blog itself such as the ability to subscribe to the content of that blog or excerpts of the blog content. You can also use RSS feeds or Atom feeds to let people know you have updated content or to let them put your content on their sites.

Blogs also have links to other blogs so they all link together, or at least the ones with similar content do. So you can see how great it is for a company or business that wants to get their name out there or make themselves known. It can be very useful to make yourself known with the popular blogs in your topic or category so that you will get advertising to your own as well.

Software

What do you need to know to build your blog? Do you need to be an expert in HTML and coding to complete this successfully? Back in the early days of blogging, programmers would have needed to know HTML to create their blogs. That isn’t true today now that we have software that converts what you type into what you want it to look like. This software makes blogging simple and easy even if you don’t know any HTML. All blogs are either hosted on someone else’s server of self-hosed on your own server. Blogger is a popular example of a blog that is hosted and Wordpress is an example that is self-hosted. Read on to find out more about these two hosting types.

Hosted blogs

Hosted blogs are usually more affordable, or even free so this is a big plus for many people, especially those that have never blogged before. Hosted blogs are really easy to create and maintain. There are some disadvantages to all this ease of use. You won’t have as many options for customization, etc when you use a hosted blog. You pretty much just have to work with what you are given.

Also, if you later want to move to a self-hosted site, you may have to start over with the search engine rankings and it can be difficult to move and keep all of your existing content.

Enjoy blogging