What is a blog?

In today's session we are going to look first at what a blog is and what elements you normally would find on one.

Look at the following example blogs, and see if you can see what they have in common...

• The Guardian's technology blog
• The TechLearning blog
• This blog...
• Teaching Young Learners of English
• An example of a splog (spam+blog=splog)
• Boing Boing (one of the most successful blogs ever)

Is a blog open to anyone?

The muddiest points [ explanation ] from our special session on blogs and blogging, in which -- among other things -- we set up our own blogs...

Is a blog open to anyone? Can anyone post on a blog?
Well, that depends on what "settings" you choose for it.... Is your blog a private diary, perhaps one in which you reflect on your teaching? Is it intended for other people? Do you want those other people to be limited to your friends and family -- or is it for absolutely anyone out there in cyberspace...?

Likewise, if it is a blog you are using with a class, you might want to consider whether or not you want to protect their privacy or not (especially if they are youngish children).

If you have set your blog up at blogger.com (as we did today), you've got the "Basic" tab under "Settings" (shown above). Answering "No" to the question "Add your blog to our listings" gives you a certain amount of privacy. Someone would then need to know the address of your blog (you could give it to them), in order to be able to access it.

One of the other settings you might want to change is who can write comments on your blog. The "Comments" tab under "Settings" allows you three choices there (as shown above), and if you "enable comment moderation" (shown below), all comments will come to you first for approval, before they get published.

You might want to enable comment moderation, by the way, as otherwise -- especially on a public blog -- you will end up with "spam" (junk) comments.

Note that "only registered users" means anyone with a Blogger.com account. Personally, I choose "Anyone" for "Who can comment?" but then enable moderation.

More "muddiest points" from today's session...

• What's a permalink?
• Editing the links on a blog
• The difference between a blog and a discussion board

The answers to these three questions are in separate posts, below...

What's a permalink?

More muddiest points from today's session...

What's a permalink?
If you know the URL (address) of a blog, you can go there and read it -- or at least you can go there and read the latest post(s) on it. However, you might want to be able to go not to the latest post but to a particular, earlier one. For that, you need the permalink -- the permanent one, that is, which isn't going to change.

On Blogger.com, rather confusingly, the permalinks are in fact hidden in the time at which they were posted (see the foot of this post). On other blogs, you will find that the permalink may be in the title of the post.

Typically, bloggers (people that blog, that is!), link to posts on other blogs -- and they want to link to that post, not the blog in general.

Editing the links on a blog

How do you edit the links that appear on your blog?
Again on Blogger.com, editing the links that appear in the sidebar on your blog requires you to do just a little delicate copying and pasting of your "template".

You need to go to the "Template" tab (shown above), and scroll way down it to near the bottom. Don't be frightened by all that code, you only really need to understand a very little of it!

What you are looking for is something that looks like this:

<h2 class="sidebar-title">Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://news.google.com/">Google News</a></li>
<li><a href="http://EDITME">Edit-Me</a></li>
<li><a href="http://EDITME">Edit-Me</a></li>
</ul>

Replace "Google News" by whatever it is you want the link to say, and replace the http://news.google.com/ by whatever you want the link to actually be.

This would create a link to Yahoo News:

<h2 class="sidebar-title">Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://news.google.com/">Google News</a></li>
<li><a href="http://uk.news.yahoo.com/">Yahoo News</a></li>
<li><a href="http://EDITME">Edit-Me</a></li>
</ul>

Notice -- very importantly -- that I took care to leave the inverted commas and > and < signs highlighted in that line!
The explanation of how to proceed from the Blogger.com "Help" file...

The difference between a blog and a discussion board

Partly it's a difference of (1) philosophy. People post things on a discussion board for which there will then (hopefully!) be answers; things are organised by topic...

On a blog, however, things are generally organized chronologically, with the latest posts definitely appearing first. The previous ones are archived, but things are definitely organised by date...

Another difference, I would suggest, is that (2) the end result is that a blog is generally going to look and feel more attractive. I recommend blogging -- particularly a (single) class blog, which your learners author -- partly because in creating something from nothing, they create something they are then proud of. If that's the case, they will want to do things on it...

Discussion boards tend to become (3) terribly messy places, and are often (4) a nightmare to have to search your way around. Blogs tend (at least superficially) to look more organised and rather more permanent.

A blog is also (5) far easier for the average user to set up and manage.

Now of course you might actually want a discussion board, and that might in fact be the best tool for what you want to do...