Blogging Technology 101

Here’s a common scenario. You subscribe to a blog, you design your site, you write a post and then you open the how to guide to figure something out and you’re faced with jargon you’ve never heard about and simply don’t understand. It happened to me. Blogging seemed so easy but once I really got into it I was faced with technologies I didn’t understand. To help you avoid this scenario, here are a few of the terms and technologies you’re likely to see:

RSS. This is a common term and you may very likely already be familiar with it. It stands for Really Simple Syndication. What it does is enable readers to subscribe to your blog and receive posts in their email box, on their home page or wherever they like to read blogs. There are now things called “readers” which collect the blogs you subscribe to for easy reading. What RSS means to you is the ability to enable your posts to be delivered to your readers rather than having them have to come to find you. It makes your blog posts that much more powerful.

Ping. There are services and feeds that regularly scan for blog posts and updates. A Ping is a simple program that tells those services that you’ve made an update. Most blogging software has this feature and you are not required to do anything, however it is important to be aware of.

Feed. Feeds are directly related to RSS technology. Remember in the RSS definition, we mentioned a person having a reader where they “keep” the blogs they subscribe to so they can easily access them? A feed is the same thing as a reader which is the same thing as a RSS aggregator. Confused yet? A feed is a file containing all of your blog posts, as a reader. If you subscribe to a feeder like Google Reader, then you have a blog feed. As a blogger, you can subscribe to services like Feedburner, now owned by Google, that make this process easy for you and your readers.

Tagging. A tag is simply a line of programming that has the effect of labeling your post so that it is easy for people to find and it is easy for you to track. Many blogging software programs automatically take care of the tagging, however you can also ‘tag’ your posts for SEO purposes. One popular tool to do this is by adding a Technorati tag. A quick visit to the Technorati website will tell you how to add tags to your blog.

Those are the most common technology terms that you’ll face when starting your blog. For more information on RSS and other blogging technologies visit: http://www.internetbasedmoms.com/blogging-rss/create-rss-feed.html. Next lesson will talk about how to monetize your blog.

===> Lesson #6 Blogging for Profit