Sunday, July 13, 2008

Blog - What,How,why and when of it

Ok so you are a blogger but do you know what blogs are.

Blog is an acronym of Web-log.

On the history of blogging, this is what wikipedia has to say

"The first web page in an online-diary format is thought to be Claudio Pinhanez's "Open Diary", which was published at the MIT Media Lab website from 14 November 1994 until 1996. Other early online diarists include Justin Hall, who began eleven years of personal online diary-writing in 1994, Carolyn Burke, who started publishing "Carolyn's Diary". on 3 January 1995, and Bryon Sutherland, who announced his diary The Semi-Existence of Bryon in a USENET newsgroup on On 19 April 1995"

A copy of the open diary can be found here

This concept of online diary became famous as Blogs. Soon people started to write about everything that they can think of. They just wrote, wrote and wrote more. The craze of blogging had begun.

Blogs are not specific to a topic,an age group or anything. It just conveys the ideas of people having enough time to sit and type.

But guys we do need to know how blogs work.
Blogs these days are are so easy that you create, edit and automatically post your blog without any effort.This ease of blogging is possible thanks to many, many programmers who have created scripts that help us perform these activities.Without going into the technicalities of it there are dynamic pages that take the data from you then put it into a database. When a person opens your blog there are scripts that fetch different entries from these databases and displays them. Apart from thses there are scripts that manage the comments, scripts to create and edit the text allowing insertion of images and videos, scripts to create and modify the template of your blog and many more scripts.

The scripts are in any one of the server-side language like PHP,JSP,ASP or in CGI scripts. The templates and the presentation aspects are made possible through javascript and CSS based scripts.

Famous blog engines include Wordpress, b2evolution, Blogger. etc

Blogging have come to allow us to share our ideas but it is expected that we follow a code of conduct to ensure that we don't hurt the sentiments of others. This has led to threats and many other troubles for many bloggers. In politically intolerant countries any blog against the idea of the state might result in fines, deportation or even jail time. Insensitive blogs might attract threats. Hence a code for blogging was proposed by Tim O'reilly
The code of conduct of blogging :
  1. Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog.
  2. Label your tolerance level for abusive comments.
  3. Consider eliminating anonymous comments.
  4. Ignore the trolls.
  5. Take the conversation offline, and talk directly, or find an intermediary who can do so.
  6. If you know someone who is behaving badly, tell them so.
  7. Don't say anything online that you wouldn't say in person.
The discussion on this code of conduct can be found here

And so folks lets blog responsibly.

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