Anatomy of a blog
Blogs have several necessary and needed elements. It used to be enough to place static posts on your site - now, people have designed reams and reams of scripts, designed to do everything, except, possibly, what you expect.
The most common question I’m asked about blogging is ‘what IS a blog exactly?’
A blog is a weblog. Nothing more, nothing less.
So, what are the best functions - the definitional attributes of a blog?
A blog allows you to post articles, essays, paragraphs, snippets - like a webpage.
It has an element of interactivity - such as commenting - this interactivity is attached to each blog - you could achieve that by posting on a forum.
A protected area so that you can post to the blog - or share that ability with people - again you can do that on forums, but unless you’ve got an incredible forum system, your rights management won’t be as simple as a blog’s.
Every blog nowadays also includes a means of ‘feeding’ its contents to readers, or other sites - RSS and Atom are two major facilities to do this, and are something that was popularized fully with blogging - this is a HUGE and important ‘anatomical’ element of a blog, but HAS been introduced to forums and other interactive scripts too.
Finally though - the vast majority of blogs include a way to trackback or ping sites - this facility allows another layer of interactivity.
While some of the more basic blogs don’t include this function - and its called many different things (blogger calls it backlinks, other blogs call them ‘trackbacks’) I believe that any community built around mutually shared knowledge should have this ‘attribution of inspiration’ facility.
So the anatomy of a blog is partially that of a Content Management System - but usually far simpler.
That’s not where it ends though. Blogging is about as fully extendable as any type of website. You can build e-commerce, galleries, podcasting streaming and more - turning your blog into a fully fledged CMS - OR more.
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