Basics of Blogging
October 7, 2008
Categories and Tags
Categories and tags are ways to categorize the posts on your blog. You can use one, both or neither if you choose. In general usage categories are used for broad based categorization and tags are used for more specific categorization. For example, if you had a blog about cooking and you wrote a post about a walnut cookie recipe, it would be placed in a cookies category and tagged walnuts. If a user selected the cookies category they would see the walnut cookie recipe along any other cookie related posts. Categories are usually displayed in list from on a side of blog and tags are shown in a tag cloud.
Feeds
A feed is way for users to see information about your blog off of your blogs website using software such Google Reader or the Live Bookmarks feature in Firefox. The feed allows the user to see when you have added new posts without having to visit your blog. Feeds can either show the entire posts or show a summary of the post. Feeds come in the RSS and Atom formats, which are technically different but appear the same to the user.
Spam Comments
Users comments on posts help to build interest for your blog, but they also open the door for spam. If your blog is fairly small, you can use manual approval of comments to weed out spam. With a larger blog, automated software is available that can deal with most spam.
Keeping your Blogging Software Updated
It you host your own blog software it is important to make sure that it is up to date, as blog software has become a popular target for hackers. A hack could be used for spam or to infect visitors of the site with malware.
