I keep telling people to read my blog and subscribe to it so they can keep up with what the Atlanta .Net Regular Guys are doing around town. The problem is that I frequently get blank stares from people when I tell them to subscribe to my blog.
“What’s a blog and how do I subscribe?”
If you are reading this webpage, you are reading a blog. A blog is short for a weblog. A weblog is basically an online journal where a person (or persons) can write down anything they want the world to read. Some people write about technology, some people write about politics, and some people write about their girlfriends. This blog tends to focus on technology, but you know that because you’re reading it.
Blogs are a great way for people to keep in touch with a wider audience. Just like any web page, all you need to read a blog is an Internet connection and a web browser. But blogs are more than just simple web pages because they offer the ability for someone to subscribe to the web page and get updates whenever something changes. This way, you can more easily keep track of what changes on a particular blog like this one without having to remember to go back to it and check it. This is really great when you read 50 or 60 blogs like I do.
What do I mean by “subscribe” to a blog? How does one “subscribe” to a web page? This is not the kind of subscribe where you give me your e-mail address and I send you stuff to read in e-mail. A blog actually publishes what is known as an RSS feed. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is basically all the editorial content of a website without any of the human readable formatting. No colors or anything like that. It looks a lot like this – a specific flavor of computer file called XML. There are programs out there, called RSS Readers which read this RSS feed and presents it to you much like e-mail. The difference here is that I, as the publisher, don’t have to worry about sending e-mails out to people, and you the reader don’t have to be concerned about your privacy and spam. The person with all the power in this relationship is you. You decide which websites you want to subscribe to. You decide how frequently you want to check for changes. You decide when you want to stop reading a specific RSS feed. All of this without the publisher doing anything other than posting their content to the web. In fact, most blogs support comments, so if you are interested in a topic you can tell the author what you think and your comments will be put online under that topic so that everyone else can read what you said.
What kind of programs read RSS feeds? There are actually tons of programs out there that can do this for you. You have to decide which one you like the best. Some of the RSS readers are services provided by websites like Bloglines.com. The advantage here is that you can read your RSS feeds from any computer. There are some that fit inside your web browser and pull all your RSS information into a web format for you. An example of this would be Mozilla FireFox’s “live bookmarks”. The advantage here is that you can seamlessly be reading a blog post, then link from a blog post to a completely new website. Finally the third category is my personal favorite – programs that handle grabbing all the RSS feeds, or aggregating all the feeds for you. I personally prefer programs like these because they offer the most flexibility and power. For example, RSSBandit allows you to work in a program similar to an e-mail program. The interface is very familiar and comfortable for me. Some of these programs, like NewsGator, actually fit inside your e-mail programs and deliver RSS information to you as if it were e-mails! Other programs like Onfolio combine several aspects – there is a standalone reader AND one that fits inside your web browser. My personal favorite is Jetbrain’s Omea Reader. I like the organizational power I get with the Omea reader that I can’t find in other programs like RSSBandit and Onfolio. Some of these programs are free, others are not. Some of these tools will actually help you write your own blog!
How can I get a blog of my very own, as I am a very clever person with lots of clever things to say? This can be both deceptively simple and complex at the same time. The easiest way to get your own blog is to ask someone you know to host it for you. That’s what Brendon and I did for three months. Then we felt confident enough to go out on our own, purchase webspace, and put up our own blog engine. A blog engine is the software program that actually turns the text I type into BOTH the webpage you are reading now AND the XML based RSS feed. There are several free blog engines available to you, notably .Text (that’s dotText) and DasBlog. This weblog uses DasBlog. There are also tools that help you publish your blog postings. I prefer to use BlogJet rather than type on a webpage (which is the default method for getting blog posts into DasBlog)
How do I find interesting blogs to read (aside from this one, of course)? This is actually the easiest part. Start with this blog and follow any links that interest you. Odds are you’ll find me referring to another person’s blog. Search for interesting topics on Google. Lots of interesting topics have people writing blog entries about them. Check with central blog services like Technorati and BlogStreet. Check with famous Internet writers like Robert Scoble.
One final note about RSS. RSS feeds are not just restricted to individual blogs. RSS is rapidly becoming THE way for an individual, group, or company to keep in touch with and establish a rapport with interested parties such as customers. Nowadays it seems like you need to have RSS publications of your sites to keep people interested. What better way to find out what’s on sale than to publish the information to the world of people who are interested enough in your products to subscribe to your RSS feed. This is what Overstock.com did with it’s WOOT.com initiative. Take a single product and sell the hell out of it with RSS until it’s gone. You know what? It’s working! RSS for shopping!
— Matt Ranlett
PS. David Cumps has an enviable internship – read his blog because it’s excellent. Read his post about blogging in general to get a different perspective of blogging 101.