Create a blog of your own

You don’t actually need to install any software on your own computer to run your own blog on VNUnet Blogs. All the settings and postings are made via a web interface.

If you prefer to record your experiences and thoughts in pictures, you can use a Photo Blog – or Phlog – service. Flickr is the best-known of these services, but there are plenty of others.

Videoblogs (Vlogs) are one of the latest twists, from sites including Blip.tv and Mefeedia.

Many newer mobile phones allow text, photos and videos to be loaded directly to your blog server while you’re on the move – a process known as moblogging.

Permalinks for posterity
Unlike traditional websites, the topic on a blog’s home page changes frequently – often daily.

Today, you might be discussing Tesco’s latest special offer and tomorrow the rights and wrongs of whaling.

Permalinks are the method whereby you can get a permanent link to a particular entry. In principle, a permalink is a deep link to a particular posting that should not alter over the course of time.

To be completely accurate there should be different permalinks for each version of a posting; for example, to take account of later corrections. This is how Wikipedia keeps track of the version history of its articles, but at present, blogging software can only create simple permalinks.

At Google’s Blogger, permalinks are created using the Create a Link function in the comments section.

However, take care when altering a posting’s heading or changing the blog settings to show several posts on one page: if you do this, Blogger changes the link structure so that previously created permalinks turn out to be not so permanent after all.

Two-way communication
Bloggers often tend to link to each others’ online postings. Even news-oriented sites often re-use or link to content from weblogs. To make things easier there is a Trackback system that enables the original author and readers of their blog to follow further discussions on other sites.

If you use it to link to another blog, your blog system will send a trackback ‘ping’ to the target blog.

Usually, all the linking pages are shown in a list under the relevant posting. But not all blogging software supports Trackback, and some use a different name: at Blogger this function is known as Backlinks.

You can turn it on or off under Settings/Comments; on the VNUnet Typepad service, you will find the settings by choosing Weblogs, Configure and then Feedback after signing in.

Searching for blogs
If you are looking for a particular blog or content, then Google’s blog search page, or one of the smaller search engines, such as Blogpulse will trawl the web.

If you are interested in a particular locality, such as your own neighbourhood, take a look at Feedmap, which lets you search for blogs that have been geographically tagged.

And although your own blog is, naturally, the most important, you can point out other interesting or relevant blogs using a ‘blogroll’, which is simply a list of links to blogs or other sites.

This is a good way of contributing to the blogging community and spreading the word about some of the other blogs you have found.

Posting to your blog
All you need to compose postings on Typepad or Blogger is a standard browser, such as Internet Explorer or Firefox – you don’t need to install any additional software.

Most services support keyboard shortcuts which will help you to get your ideas into electronic form as quickly as possible, such as Ctrl & B for bold, Ctrl & I for italic, and so on – the help pages for the blog service you’re using will provide full details.

Alternatively, you can write your blog text in Word and publish it easily using a macro, such as Blogger for Word, which does all the work of signing in to your blog site and updating the pages for you.