About blogs — comments, subscribing and feeds

I know there are many of you out there who know all about blogs and blogging and how to leave comments and how to get an RSS feed and all that other kind of techno geekery.

But there are lots of people out there who don’t really know that a blog is a very different beast from a website and maybe aren’t getting the best out of participating in my (or other people’s blogs). So here’s a little primer that I hope will help.

comments

At the end of each week’s post (or article or entry or whatever you want to call it) there is now a nice white box waiting for your comments to appear (unless you arrive on the blog’s ‘front page’, in which case see below*) . Just write what you want to say in the box (for those of you who know the language of websites, HTML, you can add little bits of HTML to make your text look pretty). You can select a ‘Profile’ to leave your comment under. Either remain anonymous, or put your real name and/ or website address in, or if you already have, say, a Google or OpenID identity, just use that.

(Don't write in the white box below this post! That will just leave a comment here. You need to go back to the post you were reading before you came here.)

Click on Preview to see what your comment will look like when it appears. If you don’t like it, just close the preview box by clicking the little cross at top right, then you can edit some more. If you do like it, then just click Post Comment and voilá, it will appear on my blog beneath the relevant post!

If you want to be notified of any other comments left on the same post, then you click on Subscribe by email at the end of the comments.

If you already receive weekly blog posts by email, then simply click on the grey title of the post at the top of the email and you will be taken straight to the right page on the blog.

I do really, really value all and any comments. It makes my day to feel that somebody is actually reading this stuff! Also, one of the reasons I started this blog was to create some kind of debate or dialogue. I certainly don’t have all the answers by any means, and can learn a lot from all you keen readers out there. So please drop by and leave me a message!

*By the way, if you arrive on my blog at the basic ‘front page’ blog.chrisrowbury.com you will see several posts one after the other. Either click on the post’s title to go to its very own page, or at the end of reading the post, click on the 3 comments (or, on a bad day, 0 comments, boo hoo!) and you will then be able to leave a comment.

subscribing

If you can’t be bothered to visit my blog every week, or forget to, or get busy with something important like the washing up, you can subscribe to the blog. That means that as soon as I get around to writing a new post, it will be sent to you directly as if by magic, so you don’t even have to go to the blog itself! One way is to subscribe by email. Just pop your email address in the box at top left and a box will pop up from Feedburner (they’re the people who provide this service for me). You will be asked to type in some random text that you see (this is to make sure you are a human being and not a robot thus helping to prevent spam). When you type in the text correctly, an email will soon arrive in your inbox asking you to verify that you really do want to subscribe to my blog. Simply click on the link in the email and Bob’s your uncle (or maybe he isn’t)!

Another way to subscribe to my blog is to use an RSS feed ...

feeds

RSS feeds are rather geeky, but terribly, terribly useful, especially for those people who read loads of blogs (there are over 50 million of the little buggers out there!) and lots of news websites. In those cases it’s really, really hard to keep up with the latest stuff. You’ll have to visit many websites and blogs, or subscribe by email and get a full inbox of stuff that you’ll need to read. What we need is a quick and efficient way to keep up with all this cool stuff.

So they invented RSS which stands for something obscure and unhelpful, but which can stand for Read for Some more Stories: it is a way online for you to get a quick list of the latest story headlines from all your favourite websites and blogs all in one place.

In the past you had to go and look at all the blogs and websites you were interested in and see if there’s anything new on them. If there isn’t, you’ve wasted valuable time getting nothing back! What if you could tell just the ones you’re interested in to let you know only when there’s some new content to read? That’s what RSS does! it feeds you the stuff you’re interested in, rather than you having to go out and look for it.

First you need to set up a place, just for you, where all the blogs and news sites you’re interested in can send their new stuff when it appears (this is called a reader). You can sign up to separate readers like Google Reader , Bloglines, Newsgator or My Yahoo! However, to make life easier, some internet browsers like Firefox let you use your browser as a reader so you don’t have to go and find a separate one!

The second step is to let the blogs and other websites you’re interested in know that you’re interested in their content (this is called subscribing to a feed). You will usually find the common RSS logo somewhere on the blog of interest (mine is in the top left corner and says: Subscribe in a reader). Just click on the logo and you’ll be taken to a page with lots of subscription options. Just select the one appropriate to the reader you’re using (My Yahoo!, Newsgator, Google, My Aol, etc.) or View Feed XML which will allow you to subscribe in your Firefox browser using Live Bookmarks.

It’s much easier than it seems, and once you’ve done it you just go to your chosen reader every now and then and you’ll see the first few lines of all the most recent posts that have been published. You can then choose which ones to read (or delete them if they seem to be of no interest).

following me

And I don’t mean stalking! Blogger have provided a new service which allows people to follow a particular blog. You can see who is following me at the top left of the blog. It’s important to realise that this is NOT the same as subscribing to my blog. You won’t get notified of new posts (unless you have a Blogger blog of your own). In fact, it’s just a fancy way of letting me know that you’re a fan and that you regularly follow what I write. And for that, I am eternally grateful!

Well, that’s more than I intended to write, but I do hope it’s of some use. I hope to hear from you soon. In the meantime, happy reading and I hope you enjoy my blog.

go to Chris Rowbury's website

Continue reading ...