Blog Resources
Introduction
There’s no concrete answer for where the term “blog” originated, but you can safely assume that it’s short for “web log.” Origin tales are a bit diverse, and range from a voice-over slip in a 1990-91 episode of The Simpsons1 to history of web logs. In short, however, blogs are online journals, and can serve a host of purposes. Many work as public diary spaces, but you’ll also find them used for group collaboration, project records, note sharing, and community discussion space.
Types of Blogs and Blog Engines
There are a variety of blog engines and providers, but the most common are probably , , , (MT), and more recently, and . All six of these engines handle themselves and are handled a bit differently.
Blogger
Blogger (http://blogger.com) is the easiest for beginning bloggers. It requires only that a user create an account, choose one of a number of available templates, and decide whether to host the site on her own server or allow Blogger to host the blog on its Blogspot server. The interface is quick and easy, and requires no real knowledge of html in order to get started. Many bloggers begin with Blogger, then move on to another blog engine after their understanding of the process and their coding skills have grown enough for them to begin to feel comfortable in a less structured environment. As a user gets comfortable with the interface and understands how to manipulate the template, she can break away from the offered templates and create or modify her own. Doing more than that tends to require a user have a solid understanding of html in order to manipulate the code any further.
Google’s recent acquisition of Blogger has already begun to show some definite changes. The interface appears to be a bit cleaner and, at first glace, potentially more stable under certain conditions, but it looks like some modification functions associated with a user’s preferences and settings are a bit more hidden. The old hiccups in Blogger’s system—generally in the form of glitchy templates that lose or hide code or bork their archives—appears to be largely resolved. The number of available templates has been reduced considerably, and those few that are offered seem to be glitch free.
Because of Blogger’s simplicity, I opt to place my own students there. Few of them have heard of blogs before, and most have never blogged, so the experience is radically new. With the help of a simple cheat sheet, however, they’re up and running in the first week of class. By the second week of posting, they have the hang of the process. By the end of the semester, several have gotten comfortable enough to begin altering the templates to suit their own personalities and preferences.
LiveJournal, Greymatter, MT, Drupal, and WordPress
LiveJournal requires that a blogger use the engine’s own blog hosting services. The idea behind the requirement is that the blogger become a member of the LiveJournal community. On the positive side, it doesn’t require that the user install any software, although you can reset Blogger to host the blog pages on your own server.
Greymatter, MT, Drupal, and WordPress all require client-side hosting. In other words, you install the blogging software on your own server and handle all the mechanics yourself.
MT, as of this writing, has a couple of glitches of its own, but nothing unmanageable, and I know the development team has been working on them. Specifically, the notification function seems to tend to fail and, in the log’s editing and management iinterface, MT sometimes lists recent posts a bit haphazardly. The posts show properly on the site, and listing them for editing purposes works properly, but the short list of most recent posts on the management page tends to omit activity.
WordPress looks much like Moveable Type, but does function rather differently. It uses a complex CSS (or two) for all the page layout, and php and mysql run the blog. It grants you a huge amount of freedom to design and control your own blog, and has some truly nifty features, but documentation and help functions are still rather weak as of the time of this writing. It tends to assume knowledge, which can be horribly frustrating for a complete greenhorn. Having said that, the program is still in its initial growth spurt, and I’m hoping that the developers will soon catch their breath enough to bring the documentation up to par with the program’s development. In the meantime, the best help is available via WordPress’s support forums—a series of discussion forums populated by the developers as well as experienced (and non) WP users.
So what’s a blog for?
There are as many reasons for blogs as there are blogs. Blogs can be private (as private as anything on the Web can be), or public. Many are personal online diaries or journals maintained by individuals, others are collaborative discussion spaces in which a community of writers participate. Some blogs are intended to share daily events with friends and family, others to log progress on a specific job or task, and still others are intended to serve as a discussion space for an event.
Generally speaking, most students find blogs a more interesting tool than vanilla-flavored discussion boards such as Blackboard’s. They can not only modify the appearance of the blog, but they can use it for more than their required assignments and tend to feel a much stronger sense of ownership of their own text when it’s posted as part of their own blog. For many of them, the concept of writing in a public space has been limited to assignments written for their own classes or online chat rooms, so the idea of writing in a space that’s wide-open to an anonymous reading public can be both exciting and intimidating.
Student assignments can include everything from reading responses to creative writing, but if a course uses a blog, let me suggest that it include a responsibility to read other student blogs so that they won’t be writing in a vacuum. In my experience, that hasn’t been a problem. I post a list of all student blogs, and many of them very much enjoy being able to browse through their peers’ blogs at regular intervals. Nevertheless, that is one of the aspects of blogging that needs to be considered and planned for. If there is no reading activity or requirement, it can be terribly easy for blogs to be written and never read.
Additional Resources
This section of the page is, at the moment, very thin. I’ll add resources as I find them.
Online Reading
. By Rebecca Blood, this is probably one of the most authoritative articles on the origin of blogging currently available. While there is room for negotiation, it’s the best starting place you’ll find on the Web.
Blog Engines
. Blogger is probably the easiest blog system for a beginning blogger to use. Blogs can either be hosted on Blogger’s Blogspot server, or on the user’s own server.
. LiveJournal requires a bit more knowledge, but the blog is hosted on LiveJournal’s server.
. Moveable Type requires a user install the blog on her own server.
. Drupal is one of the the newcomers to the blog scene, and like GreyMatter and MT, requires a user install the blog on her own server. It has a tremendous degree of flexibility and can function as a course management system. It does, however, have a fairly steep learning curve, so don’t expect a quick installation with no modifications.
. WordPress is perhaps one of the least known blogging tools at the moment, simply because it’s one of the most recently developed. Like GreyMatter and MT, it requires a user install the blog on her own server. My own blog uses WordPress.
Online Teacher’s Guide Table of Contents: