Blogging 101
The following resources were developed for the blogging episode of the AT Maine Show on April 11th and 18th, 2007. Kind of ancient history now. Enjoy!
To understand blogging we should begin with some understanding of the vocabulary and organization of this activity.
Blogging or Blog comes from the term "web log" which is simply a web-based journal. What makes blogs and blogging unique and more powerful are two elements. First is the "syndication." This is typically done with something called "RSS Feeds." The RSS purportedly stands for several possible titles the most common of which is Rapid Simple Syndication. This basically means the content of the web log is sent via a special type of XML code out into the Internet and various readers, known as "aggregators" collect and display the code. What makes this powerful is that people can use a aggregator and follow the blogs of many, many bloggers without having to go and visit each site individually. The RSS code can also be embedded within other blogs or read by other devices including PDA, cell phones and some GPS units. The number of these alternative devices is expected to increase in the years ahead making RSS and XML the hot format of our time.
The second part of blogging that makes it popular are the ability to make hyperlinks, add video/audio content, and generate comments from readers. This has resulted in many bloggers commenting on the blogs of others social bookmarking, and tagging thus creating a network of blogs within the world of blogs which is often referred to as the blogosphere.
Glossary:
(Adapted from Alexandra Samuel socialsignal.com and wikipedia.org)
Aggregation: Gathering information from multiple web sites, typically via RSS. Aggregation lets web sites remix the information from multiple web sites, for example by republishing all the news related to a particular keyword.
Blog: Originally short for "weblog", a blog is simply a web-based “journal” where the owner/writer posts thoughts, ideas, opinions, pictures, and other media. Typically the blog that contains entries in reverse chronological order, with the most recent entry on top. Blogging has taken off because the explosion in blogging software and services -- like Blogger, TypePad and WordPress -- has turned blogging into one of the easiest ways for people to maintain a constantly updated web presence. In addition to the classic text blog, we now have photo blogs (consisting of uploaded photos), audio blogs (a.k.a. "podcasts") and video blogs (“vcasts” which consist of regularly uploaded video files).
Blogosphere: The term blogosphere was coined on September 10 by Brad L. Graham, as a joke. It was re-coined in 2002 by William Quick and was quickly adopted and propagated by the warblog community. The term resembles the older word "logosphere" (from Greek logos meaning word, and sphere, interpreted as world), the "the world of words," the universe of discourse. It also resembles the term " (Greek nous meaning mind).
Blogroll: A list of recommended sites that usually appears in the sidebar of a blog. These sites are typically sites that are either on similar topics, sites that the blogger reads regularly, or sites that belong to the blogger's friends or colleagues. The term "blogroll" also evokes the concept of political logrolling (when legislators promise to vote for one another's pet bills) -- which is not unlike bloggers' habit of reciprocating links by posting links to blogs that link back to their own blogs.
Moblogging: Short for “mobile blogging,” moblogging refers to posting blog updates from a cell phone, camera phone or PDA (personal digital assistant). Mobloggers may update their web sites more frequently than other bloggers, because they don't have to be at their computers in order to post.
Newsreader (Aggregator): A newsreader/aggregator gathers the news from multiple blogs or news sites via RSS, allowing readers to access all their news from a single web site or program. Online newsreaders (like Bloglines, Pluck, or Newsgator) are web sites that let you read RSS feeds from within your web browser. Desktop newsreaders download the news to your computer, and let you read your news inside a dedicated software program.
Podcast: An audio blog, typically updated weekly or daily. You don't have to have an iPod to listen to a podcast; although you can download podcasts to an ipod, you can also listen to podcasts on a desktop computer, or many other mp3 players. Recently some bloggers have installed software that will convert their written blog into a podcast. Most Podcasting is done with RSS feeds allowing aggregation of the podcast.
RSS (Feeds): A format for storing online information in a way that makes that information readable by lots of different kinds of software. Many blogs and web sites feature RSS feeds (syndication): a constantly updated version of the site's latest content, in a form that can be read by a newsreader/aggregator. The translation for what RSS stands for is a bit of a controversy while most people think it means “Really Simply Syndication,” some people think it means Rapid Simple Syndications and several other combinations.
Social Bookmarking: The collaborative equivalent of storing favorites or bookmarks within a web browser, social bookmarking services (like del.icio.us or Furl) let people store their favorite web sites online. Social bookmarking services also let people share their favourite web sites with other people, making them a great way to discover new sites or colleagues who share your interests.
Social Networking: Social networking web sites help people discover new friends or colleagues by illuminating shared interests, related skills, or a common geographic location. Leading examples include MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, LinkedIn, and 43people. Many of these sites are simply blogs that are less public and where the blogger can control who has access to their site (e.g., “My Friends” in MySpace)
Tags and Tagging: Keywords that describe the content of a web site, bookmark, photo or blog post. You can assign multiple tags to the same online resource, and different people can assign different tags to the same resource. Tag-enabled web services include social bookmarking sites (like del.icio.us), photo sharing sites (like Flickr) and blog tracking sites (like Technorati). Tags provide a useful way of organizing, retrieving and discovering information.
Reading Blogs - Aggregators & Searching
There are literally dozens of ways to read blogs from regular web browsers to special software applications that are installed in your browser, into your e-mail client, or even free standing applications. The world of blogging is growing rapidly and, as a result, there are new technologies being developed every day.
The easiest way to read a blog is to simply type in the address and view it in your browser. In this manner, you get to see the layout scheme and all of the various "widgets" and add-on features the owner has put on their blog. Most of these are simply "window dressing" but some of these features add functionality to the blog. And in some of these cases, these widgets and add-on features will make parts of the blog inaccessible to people using screen readers.
One of the more popular ways people read blogs is to use a News Aggregator which, as the name implies, allows the user to collect links to many, many blogs and follow the content. These aggregators make use of the special RSS code that is contained in just about all blogs. The aggregator searches for the RSS feed and then takes that content and adds it to the aggregator. In come cases the feed only collects a the "subject line" and a few beginning sentences, in some cases it "grabs" all of the content of the blog. This variable is controlled by the owner of the blog as part of the set up.
Like all blogs, the aggregator lists the content of the blog in reverse chronological order therefore listing the newest items first. Most of these applications will only display the items that have not been previously read, but this setting can be changed and the aggregator will show all of the blog entries - BTW, this is not a good idea since some blogs have literally thousands of entries.
The best part of using an aggregator is that you can scan a large amount of content quickly. Most people will scan the subject lines and only read the blog entries that look interesting. There also ways to use filters in the aggregator so you will only see blog entries that fit the filter criterion.
For a rather complete list of News Aggregators available visit News On Feeds http://www.newsonfeeds.com/faq/aggregators
Some aggregators require registering as a user. For example, the news aggregator that I use is Bloglines one of the web-based applications. This one requires a registration and log in, but the advantage is I can check my account from any browser on any computer anywhere in the world and see my list of blogs.
Steve and I will be experimenting to see which ones are accessible.
The American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) has a report on news aggregators on there website , however it is not clear how long ago the report was written and some of the information may be outdated. The tested the applications using JAWS 5.1 while the current version of JAWS is 8.0.
Searching for blogs and blogged information can be done in a number of ways. There are specialized search databases that are exclusively design for search blogged content. The two most popular are Technorati and Sphere . However you can also search for blogs within Bloglines and using standard search engines like Google and Yahoo. And both Google and Yahoo now have special search sites:
Google Blog Search- Blogsearch.google.com
Yahoo Blog Search - Ysearchblog.com
Web Resources
Easy Journal reported to be one of the better "accessible" blog programs
Article from C-Sun 2006 on Accessible Blogging
A blog about accessible blogging
Article from AFB on blogging accessibility
Free, Hosted, Do-it-yourself?
Blogs come in many varieties and with various degrees of service. First we can separate them into "hosted" or "do-it-yourself (DIY)".
Most people use a hosted blog. For DIY blogs you need a web server and a database. If you have this, there are many free, open-source blog application that you can install on your server. Most people use web servers with Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP environment, the so-called LAMP environment. Nearly all of the open-source blog applications use this set up.
For the 99% of the rest of the world, you will using a hosted blog. This may be a FREE service likeBlogger, Easy Journal, Live Journal, or even the more complicated services like MySpace and Friendster wish are basically blogs with lots of add-ons that encourage "social networking." Blogger, which is owned and operated by Google, is the most popular and still is completely free and is served up without advertising on your blog.
There are also paid, or commercially hosted blog like Type Pad where you pay either a monthly or annual charge. The commercial hosts are usually used by businesses and organizations, but quite frankly offer little more than the free service. So, it would probably be best to start out with a free blog service.
Setting Up Account and Designing Your Blog
Setting up an account is usually very easy and involves going to the free blog site, choosing an account name, password and giving them a valid e-mail address. The account setup usually requires some validation or authentication which is accomplished by sending an e-mail to you to verify the e-mail address is valid.
Designing your blog is usually very straight forward and involved the choosing of a "theme." The theme is basically a style sheet that controls the type, size and color of fonts, backgrounds and basic layout of the blog. You may choose the default style or often pick from dozens of choices. For people using AT screen readers, this is often the most frustrating part of setup since the theme is entirely a visual task. So you may want to ask for advice from some friends or just choose the default settings.
Nearly all blogs use the same basic 2-3 column layout with a header and footer (it seems two columns are becoming the norm). The header typically contains text and some image(s). The name of the blog is located here and is typically your account name. But sometime you can customize this along with things like a short catch phrase which adds some "personality" and individuality to your site. The footer usually has some identifying info about the blog or host service.
The major content of the blog is usually found in the left of center column (depending on whether you use two or three columns). All blogs use a reverse chronological order, so the most recent entry is always located at the top and as you read down the page you read older and older entries. Some blogs only show the last entry and to read older entries you have to use the "archive."
Most blogs use the other column(s) for archived articles, links and blog rolls (other blogs you are reading and following). Some of the archives are provided with a small calendar which highlights the dates when blogs entries were made, but use of this is becoming less common. Usually the archives are simply listed by month and all of this is customizable by the blogger. There are also a number of special plug-ins called "widgets" which do everything from serve up special images, advertisements and special features. For example, one of my blogs has a widget that lists what other blogs in the world are linked to mine. Many people add widgets that link to their other social networking sites like the photo service Flickr or the video service YouTube. These widgets require some special installation and the embedding of code which is done from the administration part of your blog.
Entering Content and Administration
Most blog applications have a separate login area for the owner that is not located on the blog itself. After entering your username and password you are shown an administration section (in Blogger this is called the "desktop."). From this section you can simply go to a link that says "enter new post" or something like that, or you can edit, or delete old posts (an often used feature in my case). In editing old posts, one of the common styles used is to utilized the "strikeout" effect so that readers can quickly see that what was posted has been changed and new information is pasted in next to this. I'm not sure how screenreaders render this effect.
Most of the blog application have a pretty straightforward WYSIWYG editor built in, most with spell checkers. The editor allows for many style elements such as Bold Italic Blockquote. But there is a cost to accessibility here. Some of these style elements may not meet accessibility standards or use code that is outdated (e.g., the FONT tag).
The editor usually has some button that allows for the inserting of images or embedded code (for scripts like Flash). Again this is an area where accessibility issues come into play as many of the blog programs insert code that may not be accessible. For example, many of these program fail to include the ALT attribute for images. Although this is getting better among blog applications, I still see a lot of blogs out there that have invalid or non-accessible code, and I'm sure you do too.\
Once you have completed your entry and checked your spelling, you must now publish the content to the blog. Many of the applications offer a "preview" button which allows you to get one more look before posting. Once posted, the content can always be re-edited and re-posted, but some of the news aggregrators may get your initial posting.
What Do I Write About?
Having maintained several blogs over the past two years, my biggest issue is figuring out what to write about. I generally have no problem with having things to say...some might argue I never know when to shut up! I just finished two brief and well-written articles about how and what to blog about. The articles are Nine Lessons for Would-Be Bloggers and Nine More Lessons for Would-Be Bloggers and they answer this question, and about 17 other important questions about blogging. If you are a seasoned blogger, or someone considering starting your own blog, read these articles!