It’s been exactly two years to the day since I started this blog, so it’s time for the annual review of my blogging achievements and time to reflect on what to do with it next.

When I launched my blog, I planned on posting  once a week. At the time this didn’t seem to be too onerous a schedule, and one which I managed  to adhere to for a few months. However, after the first year my posting frequency slipped to about 3 posts a month and has since slipped to a little less than 2 posts a month. So I guess at this rate my blog has another 2 years to go before I’m not posting anything at all!

Towards the end of my first year blogging, I started posting a monthly podcast about general internet related topics, which I imaginatively titled The Internet Monthly (wonder how I thought that one up?). While I record this podcast myself every month (with my friend Winnie Clarke providing her professional vocal talents for the recording), I’m afraid I can’t take the credit for the content as I record this podcast for Zen Internet’s monthly customer newsletter.

Zen Internet have kindly allowed me to syndicate this podcast on my blog, which essentially means that I have the intrinsic content for one blog post sorted every month. This then leaves me one proper post to try and squeeze out every month to maintain my two posts a month.

The WordPress Experience

Over the past year I’ve had to to install a couple of updates to WordPress (the system that I use to power my blog), which have been released to improve security and offer a few new features (primarily to the administration part of the system).

I have also added a few additional plugins to my WordPress system to further enhance its functionality and improve security. I’m presently using 19 plugins (a modest increase of 3 over last year’s count).

Blogging Benefits

As a direct consequence of running this blog over the past two years, I recently acquired a few little jobs setting up other people’s blogs using WordPress and guiding them through the initial stages of blogging. Without the experience of running this blog and everything that I’ve learnt on the way, I wouldn’t have had the confidence to tackle these jobs; certainly not enough to provide a quality service that I like to try and achieve.

Statistics for the Last Year

Whilst my posting frequency has undoubtedly declined, I have still seen a steady growth in traffic to my site. This seems due to the back catalogue of previous posts, which are increasingly being found by the search engines.

WordPress Statistics

• Posts: 64 (42 last year)
• Visitor Comments: 156 (81 last year)
• Spam Comments: 12,940 (2,849 last year)

Spam

Unfortunately, with the growth in traffic to my site, there has also been a substantial increase in spam comments by 350%.

The following graph shows spam comments received by my blog in the last 6 months. Fortunately, most of this spam has been trapped by the Askimet plugin built into WordPress:

Google Analytics

I monitor the traffic on my website using Google’s analytics service, which provides a vast array of statistics regarding the site’s pages and visitors.

Each month I am now receiving over 6,000 visitors with over 8,000 page views. Last month’s visitor and page view statistics are:

• Visits: 6,248 (2,515 last year)
• Pages Viewed: 8,150 (3,258 last year)

In the past twelve months I’ve had over 45,000 visits to my site with almost 60,000 page views. The following graphs show a steady rise in visits and page views over the past year:

The huge spike in traffic on 21 March 2009 corresponded to 415 visits in a single day being driven to my website from the social bookmaking site StumbleUpon, all of which were to the same post on my blog: Song Capacity Calculator for MP3 Players.

Traffic Sources:

The majority of my website’s traffic (87%) was brought in from search engines, with Google accounting for 94% of this search traffic! This is a significant increase over last year, where the search engines were responsible for 76% of my blog’s traffic.

Countries of Visitors:

My blog attracts visitors from the world over; 174 countries/territories in total.

The United States and the United Kingdom remain the predominant countries, accounting for 50% of the traffic, with 36% of visitors coming from the US and 18% from the UK.

Subscriber Statistics

The RSS feed on my blog is provided through Google’s FeedBurner service, which records a wealth of useful statistics about the blog’s subscribers.

I currently have 90 subscribers (18 of which subscribe by e-mail) and have now implemented a real time display of the number of subscribers in the header of my blog. This is an increase (260%) over last year’s total of 25 subscribers.

Summary

This year I’ve increased the number of visitors to my site (and consequently page views) by 200%! Not bad really considering my posting frequency has dropped by 40%. Imagine what I could achieve if I really focussed on the blog?

You can view last year’s statistics on my previous blog post: Happy Birthday Blog.

The most popular article on my blog by far is still Embedding Album Art in MP3 Files, receiving 65% of the blog’s entire traffic.

The top 5 posts on my blog are:

1. Embedding Album Art in MP3 Files (38,442 views)
2. What is Joint Stereo? (3,824 views)
3. Song Capacity Calculator for MP3 Players (3,278 views)
4. What are ID3 Tags in MP3 Files? (2,512 views)
5. Are Your Speakers Wired Correctly? (2,102 views)

The recurring theme amongst all of my top posts seems to be MP3 files and audio.

Quality Vs Quantity

While I no longer seem to be able to dedicate the time to produce an in-depth post as often as I would wish, I would prefer to continue this blog producing quality articles that people would find helpful or inspiring on a less frequent basis, rather than turn out drivel every other day on what I had for lunch or the contents of my navel. After all, isn’t that what twitter is for?

And so…

To all of you that have subscribed to my blog and follow it regularly, thanks very much for your support. Hopefully I won’t loose heart completely and can continue to turn out the odd informative and interesting post in amongst the podcasts.

If you’ve just stumbled on this blog and have managed to make it to the bottom of this post, then thanks for your precious attention and while you’re here, why not check out some of the above posts?

It’s been exactly one year to the day since I re-launched my website as a BLOG and published my first blog post. So perhaps it’s an appropriate time to look back at what I’ve achieved on the blogging front in the past year, what I’ve learnt and what  plans I have for the blog .

When I launched my blog, I planned on writing a post  once a week. This didn’t seem to be a too onerous schedule and I managed to maintain it for the first few months, but of late my posting frequency has slipped a little. I now seem to average 3 posts a month.

With each of my posts, I try to aim for a post length of 1,000 words or so. Due to the technical nature of most of my posts, I don’t just hammer them out and click publish. I like to research the post, checking my facts and then spend a little time after writing to re-read and edit the post to make sure it all makes sense and flows correctly; it’s surprising how much time this takes, hence my slip in posting frequency.

Design Change

After the first few months of blogging, the first significant change that I made was to redesign the theme for my blog. The original theme was taken from my static website that was the predecessor of my blog. This theme was a 760 pixel wide  design, designed to work on older computer monitors that are only 800 pixels wide.

My new blog design/theme is based on the wider design format of 980 pixels that has become more prevalent in the industry, with bigger monitors being more commonplace.

Currently, approximately 2% of the visitors to my blog have 800 pixel wide screens or less, all the rest have 1024 pixels or wider, which render the new design without any problems.

Because the text on the new blog theme is left justified within the design, even monitors with a 800 pixel resolution will be able to display the main body of the text in a readable form. This provides a graceful and controlled degradation of performance for the few visitors with lower resolution monitors.

Updates and Tweaks

Over the year there have been a few updates to the WordPress system that I use to power the blog. These updates have been included on my site to make use of new features and improve security.

I added Gravatars to post comments so that commentators can leave a thumbnail image of themselves alongside their comments and recently enabled nested comments to make it easier to follow comment threads.

I have added various plugins to my WordPress system along the way to enhance its functionality and improve security. At the time of writing, I presently use 16 plugins.

While I wouldn’t claim to be an expert at WordPress, I’ve certainly learnt a lot about it and can usually force it to succumb to my will, with the theme for the site being my own design.

Statistics

Since the conversion of my old website to its present blog format, I have seen a steady growth in traffic to my site. This is obviously due to the fact that the website has had a lot of content added to it over the last 12 months, 42 posts/articles in total:

WordPress Statistics

• New Posts: 42
• Visitor Comments: 81 (17 of which are my replies)
• Spam Comments: 2,849

Spam

Unfortunately, with the steady growth in traffic to my site, there has also been a steady and corresponding growth in spam comments.

The following graph shows the spam comments that my blog has received in the last 6 months. Fortunately, all of this spam has been automatically trapped by the Askimet plugin built into the WordPress system:

Google Analytics

To monitor the traffic on my website, I use Google’s free analytics service, which provides an incredible array of in-depth statistics about the pages viewed on my site and the visitors that visit.

I am now regularly receiving over 2,000 visitors each month with over 3,000 pages being viewed. Last month’s visitor and page view statistics are:

• Visits: 2,515
• Pages Viewed: 3,258

Over the past year I’ve had nearly 15,000 visits to my site with over 20,000 page views. The graphs below clearly show a steady rise in visits and page views to my blog over the past 12 months:

The huge spike in traffic on 09 September of last year corresponds to 300 visits in a single day being driven to my website from the social bookmaking site StumbleUpon, all of which were to the same post on my blog: Embedding Album Art in MP3 Files.

Traffic Sources:

The majority of my website’s traffic (76%) was brought in from search engines, with Google accounting for 97% of this search traffic!

Countries of Visitors:

My blog has attracted visitors from all over the globe, from 134 countries/territories in total.

However, the United States and the United Kingdom account for 60% of the traffic, with 37% of visitors coming from the US and 23% from the UK.

RSS FeedBurner Statistics

The RSS feed on my blog is provided through Google’s FeedBurner service. While this may initially seem like an extra unnecessary layer of complication compared to just offering the basic RSS feed, FeedBurner actually records a lot of useful statistics about subscribers to my blog, as well as also allowing me to offer subscription to my blog via e-mail.

I currently have 25 subscribers, 13 of which subscribe by e-mail:

What Next?

The most popular article on my blog by far is Embedding Album Art in MP3 Files, receiving 50% of the blog’s entire traffic.

The top 5 posts on my blog are:

1. Embedding Album Art in MP3 Files (10,542 views)
2. Song Capacity Calculator for MP3 Players (1,337 views)
3. What is Joint Stereo? (1,046 views)
4. Choosing Bit Rates for Podcasts (891 views)
5. What are ID3 Tags in MP3 Files? (826 views)

The recurring theme amongst all of my top posts is MP3 files and podcasting.

Looking at the blog’s categories, the one that I seem to have written the most for is the podcasting category. I think this points to the general direction that I would like to take the blog over the coming year.

I’ve always been interested in audio production and recording since a young age, so I guess this also reflects my passion. Although since my accident, it has taken a while for me to find my way back into this field and to find a way to actively contribute as opposed to just sitting on the sidelines watching (or listening as the case may be).

Technological advances have also helped me in this respect. MP3 players and iPods are now common place, which in turn has given rise to the success of the podcast format.

Recording audio is thankfully no longer constrained to the analogue domain and multi-track tape machines, with virtually any home PC now being capable of running advanced music production software (Digital Audio Workstations).

With even modest home equipment, it’s possible to produce professional sounding results with a little effort and attention to detail. This is where I find the challenge and the enjoyment and can hopefully share some of my experiences with others in future posts on this blog.

If you’ve stayed along for the ride so far, thanks very much for your support. Hopefully there’ll be more of the same to follow.

Certain websites are obviously blogs, whereas with others it’s sometimes far more difficult to tell. So what is it that really defines a website as being a blog and when is a blog no longer a blog?

Blogging is now extremely popular, some may even say it’s become a phenomenon. With millions of blogs worldwide, you will have undoubtedly stumbled across one in your travels through cyberspace, either knowingly or unknowingly.

However, with so many blogs around nowadays, they invariably come in a bewildering array of different shapes and sizes. Some are immediately obvious as blogs, others less so. So what is a blog and what are the key elements that define one as such?

What is a Blog?

Before getting into the whys and wherefores of when a website is considered to be a blog and when it isn’t, perhaps it’s first wise to explore the origins of the word blog and what is conventionally considered as being a blog:

The word blog is an amalgamation of two words; web log, which has become contracted simply to blog.

All blogs are websites and therefore exist in the online world by their very nature, but blogs are a specific type of website.

From the derivation of the word blog, we can see that blogs are loosely defined as online logs, or diaries.

The Wikipedia definition of a blog is:

A website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order.

Elements of a Blog

By their nature, blogs have regular postings, but who actually writes these posts and how often?

Authors

Most blogs are usually written by a single author, or owner of the blog. However, blogs can also have guest posts from other individuals and some larger, typically commercial blogs can have teams of writers.

By the same token, other non-blog websites may only have a single author, or a team of authors. So clearly the number of authors that a website has can’t be used as the definition of a blog.

Posting Frequency

On this blog,  I try to post a new article every week or so. Some people may post on their blog at completely random intervals, or whenever the urge takes them. Some will post every day (probably more typical of commercial blogs) and the bigger commercial blogs may even have multiple posts every day.

Likewise, other non-blog websites can be updated daily, weekly, monthly, or whenever. So again, the posting frequency of a website can’t be used to define it as a blog either.

Blogging Software

Blogs, being websites, are hosted on web servers, usually running some form special blogging software tailored specifically for the purpose.

To run a  blog you could use a free blogging service, such as Google’s Blogger to host your blog, or you could host the website yourself and use free blogging software, such as this site uses, like WordPress.

So, does the use of such blogging software automatically define the resultant website as a blog? No.

Take WordPress as an example, by their own admission it’s claimed to be:

“…a personal publishing system…”

or

“…a state-of-the-art publishing platform…”

While WordPress was undoubtedly designed as a blogging platform, at it’s core is a content management system (CMS) for building a website, and being customisable, this can be pushed into use as the basis for many different types of websites, not just blogs.

The same can be said of other “blogging software platforms“. So, while such software was designed primarily for blogs, the software does not define the website as being a blog, as the same software could equally well be used for other purposes.

Types of Blog

Blogs come in all shapes and sizes…

Commercial or Non-Commercial

Some blogs are run purely and simply as a business, to make money, invariably by advertising, or the promotion of other people’s products for a sales commission. Other blogs are run for a variety of reasons, depending on the individual or individuals involved.

Subject Matter

Some blogs focus on a particular subject or subject area, whereas others may act purely as personal diaries, or cover much broader areas of subject matter.

Multimedia

Most blogs have individual text articles, or posts, but they may also embed pictures or videos within them. Some blogs however, will specialise on videos (video blogs or vlogs), while others may focus on photographs (photoblogs).

While blogs originated as online diaries, predominantly textual, they have since evolved and now cover any topic under the sun, making use of numerous web-based media in the process to get their message across.

Clearly therefore, a website cannot be defined as a blog by its subject matter, nor by the media used to convey its message (other than it has to be web based), or by whether its purpose is to make money or not.

As Clear as Mud

So, are we any further forward to defining the essential elements of a blog? I suspect not, as on the fringes they can be very hard to pin down.

For me I think the key element, other than that a blog has regular postings, is that these postings are displayed in reverse chronological order. Remember though…

• Blogs may have one author, or many authors
• Blogs may cover one subject area, or numerous subject areas
• Blogs may be commercial, or non-commercial
• Blogs may have hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or random postings
• Blogs may be textual, video, audio or pictorial

…but they’re still blogs!

Have a look at this example: Digital Photography School

It is a blog, but does it leap out as such when you first see it? Maybe not.

It’s a commercial website, designed to make money, it has a team of authors, its has daily updates, it focuses (no pun intended) on digital photography and combines text and pictures to get it’s message across.

However, none of this is specific to a blog, another type of website could offer all of the same, but the articles are regular and are in reverse chronological order!

Not all blogs or forums allow their users to have pictures of themselves next to their comments or posts, but those that do tend to utilise the same easy-to-use system.

If you post questions on forums, or leave comments on blog posts and would like to enhance your comments with your photograph or some graphical icon, then read on, as it’s really not that difficult to achieve.

Avatars

The little pictures that you see next to blog comments or forum posts are called avatars. An avatar is a computer user’s representation of themselves in the online world.

In computer games an avatar is often the three-dimensional character that users use to represent themselves, in blogs and forums though, an avatar normally takes the form of a picture of themselves, a cartoon representation, or some graphical icon having some particular meaning or significance to the user.

To be able to use your own avatar on different blogging or forum platforms, there would really need to be a universally accepted system for the use and transfer of avatars across platforms, otherwise you’d have to set up a separate avatar for every system or website that you’re likely to use. This, as you could imagine, would be a real pain.

Fortunately, such a universal system does exist and it’s called GRAVATAR.

Gravatars

A gravatar is a Globally Recognised Avatar and is an free online service to serve avatar images globally and in a defined way.

A gravatar is always square and can be up to 512 pixels wide, although the default standard is 80 x 80 pixels.

To be able to use gravatars, all you need is a valid e-mail address and a suitable image that you want to use as your avatar.

Gravatars are linked to your e-mail address. Whenever you leave a comment on a blog post, the blogging software uses your e-mail address to retrieve your avatar from the gravatar website. However, in an effort to alleviate spam your e-mail address is not used directly, but an encrypted version of it, called an MD5 hash (or message digest), is used instead.

The MD5 hash, derived from your e-mail address, uniquely identifies your gravatar and prevents spam by not sending your real e-mail address in the process. Furthermore, there is no possibility of anyone extrapolating your e-mail address from the MD5 hash!

The MD5 hash of an e-mail address is always 32 characters long, using the characters 0 – 9 and a – f (hexadecimal notation). For example, the MD5 hash of the e-mail address iHaveAn@email.com is:

3b3be63a4c2a439b013787725dfce802

To call up the gravatar linked to this e-mail address using its MD5 hash, the blogging software would use something of the following format:

www.gravatar.com/avatar/3b3be63a4c2a439b013787725dfce802

Try clicking on this link and your browser should display the gravatar logo.

Ratings

The gravatar system also has an in-built (voluntary) rating system to try and prevent inappropriate images being displayed.

When choosing your gravatar image, if you feel that it may be unsuitable for certain audiences, you can choose which of the following ratings is most appropriate for it:

• G   – Suitable for all audiences
• PG – Possibly offensive, usually for audiences 13 and above
• R   – Intended for adult audiences above 17
• X   – Even more mature than above

Website managers running websites supporting the gravatar system can set the appropriate rating for their site. For example, if you ran a site that children may visit, then you would set the site’s gravatar rating to G. This would mean that only user’s gravatars with a G rating would be displayed and any gravatar with a higher rating would be replaced by a safe, default image.

Sign Up for a Gravatar

If this captures your imagination and you fancy getting your own avatar, then you will need to sign up with the gravatar system.

To sign up for a gravatar, you need to:

1. Go to www.gravatar.com and click on the signup link
2. Enter your e-mail address and then click signup
3. Check your e-mail and click on the activation link in the e-mail sent to you from gravatar. If you can’t find the e-mail, try checking your junk mailbox just in case your spam filter has caught it by mistake.
4. Choose a username and password
5. Click on the link to add an image
6. Choose an image from your computer and upload it to gravatar
7. Crop and size your image
8. Choose a suitability rating for your avatar

You should now be ready to go. Your avatar image is now linked to your e-mail address through the gravatar system and will appear when you leave comments on gravatar enabled blogs and forums.

Give it a Go

If you’ve successfully managed to create a gravatar and are now itching to try it out, why not leave a comment on this post to see how it all works?

While structured articles may not be appropriate to every blog, the vast majority of blogs will undoubtedly benefit from having a definite article structure, easing readability, improving general reader engagement and even helping you during the writing process.

Writing a blog post or web article is not that dissimilar to writing any other sort of article, and as such many of the same writing principles remain. To communicate your thoughts in cohesive and coherent fashion, and capture the reader’s attention, your articles really need to follow a defined structure. A good article structure will help readability and enable you to get your point across better.

Having a defined structure to your articles not only benefits your readers, but also greatly helps during the writing phase; helping you to organise and collate your thoughts into a logical structure and hopefully prevent you from rambling too much or veering off topic.

Introduction Section

All articles should begin with some form of introduction to capture the reader’s attention and give them a bit of a clue as to what the whole thing is about.

Title

The first and most important part of the introduction is the article’s title or headline. This should be short and snappy, grabbing the reader’s attention, whilst also giving them a good indication of what the article’s all about.

RSS Summary

If your blog provides an RSS feed in partial format, then the RSS summary is the next stage of the introduction section to consider. A one line summary of the article is probably the best option for this, again aimed at quickly grabbing the reader’s attention, enticing them to read the rest of the article.

Teaser Paragraph

Once you’ve managed to grab your reader’s attention and pull them in with your alluring headline, then the first paragraph, or teaser paragraph is probably the most important paragraph of all. This paragraph gives the reader a brief summary of the whole article, encouraging them to continue reading the rest of the article.

The teaser paragraph may also be used by certain websites as a summary of your article, or be used by some software to automatically generate an RSS summary, and as such is extremely important. Having this paragraph in bold can also serve to highlight it’s importance and draw the reader’s attention.

Introduction

Additional introductory paragraphs serve to further outline the article in more detail, giving the reader a good understanding of what the article is all about and what they can expect to get from the article.

Body

The body of the article is where you develop your central theme and explain your thoughts and ideas in detail. This section should form the majority of your article and follow on from the introduction with a clear and definite structure.

Headings and Sub-headings

Headings and sub-headings should be used to give structure to the body of the article, highlighting the key points being covered, whilst also serving to break up long, monotonous blocks of text.

Paragraphs

In general paragraphs should be kept short to enhance readability, but long enough to present an idea or develop a theme. Long paragraphs should be broken up into logical chunks with subsequent paragraphs continuing the theme.

One line paragraphs should be used sparingly and only for special effect.

Lists can also be considered as a form of paragraph and as such should not be too long as they will loose their impact. Lists are also a very useful way of summarising key points in a quick and easily digestible fashion.

Images can help to enhance the body of the text and explain complex ideas (a picture speaks a thousand words), but should be placed close to the text that they relate to.

As attention spans are not what they used to be (particularly on the web), articles should not be too long, but should focus on a single, primary topic.  If while writing the article you get verbal diarrhoea, it may be worth considering splitting the article into separate sections and creating a series related articles instead.

Summary

The summary, or conclusion of the article reiterates the main points of the article in a simple overview, refreshing the points covered in the body and drawing any key conclusions from the discussions.

So, in conclusion, following a definite structure can help you to get your thoughts down in a coherent and logical format, which not only helps you during the writing process, but will also pay dividends improving readability, enabling you to get your point across better and generally increasing reader engagement.

A good, general structure suitable for blog articles is:

• Title / Headline (short and snappy)
• RSS Summary (1 line)
• Teaser Paragraph (single summary paragraph, in bold)
• Introduction (outline of the article)
• Body (the nitty gritty of the article)
• Summary / Conclusion (conclusions and overall summary)

Once you’ve gone through the initial birth pains and learning curve of setting up your blog, then begins the rewarding phase when you’re no longer learning to blog, but begin blogging to learn.

If you’ve never blogged before, then you’ll have a steep learning curve to go through while you learn the technicalities of blogging, together with the language used by bloggers and the protocols and ethics of the blogging community.

However, once this period is over and you get into your stride with your blog, the learning doesn’t have to cease. At this point, you have a choice. You can continue bumbling along, writing your regular postings on your particular topic using your new found blogging skills, or you can push yourself to learn more about your field of interest, expanding your, and your reader’s horizons in the process.

To Blog, or Not to Blog?

If you’ve got this far, then at some point you must have answered this question and made the decision to start blogging. For myself, it’s been about two months since I took the plunge (after much deliberation) and started this blog with my first posting.

But why did you decide to blog? Well, I suppose this must essentially be the same for most bloggers, because you wanted to share your knowledge or experiences with other like-minded individuals.

Like everyone who’s started a blog before, I’ve been through the initial stages of complete blogging ignorance to a level of moderate blogging competence and have learnt a massive amount in the process. Whilst I’ve learnt a lot about blogging through this, the learning opportunities haven’t stopped, but have actually just started!

Two Way Traffic

While you may have set your blog up in true altruistic fashion, to share your pearls of wisdom with an unsuspecting public, for it to continue to grow there has to be two way traffic. If you’re not getting anything out of your blog, then ultimately your enthusiasm will wane and your blog will fizzle out.

What you get out of your blog may vary. Some may write a blog just to get stuff off their chest, which can be quite cathartic in it’s own right, but is essentially a one way street. You can only shout from the rooftops for so long until you get a sore throat!

A lot will gain from their blogs via the comments left by readers, engaging in the community aspects of blogging, sharing experiences or opinions and questioning established ideas and concepts.

However, there’s also a more subtle and indirect way to get something back from your blog…

Research

Once your blog is up and running, you will probably begin to write about your chosen subject. In the initial stages you’ll have a lot to talk about, waxing lyrical about things you’re passionate about. In your haze of enthusiasm you are likely to think you can keep this up until the cows come home. Unfortunately they do; usually around milking time!

As time goes on and your back catalogue of topics begins to dwindle and your well of knowledge dries up, you’ll need to start digging deeper to research your topics. This research may take you in directions that you wouldn’t of previously considered, sparking new and fresh ideas. This could be instigated by comments left by your readers, or by your own research.

Keep Blogging, Keep Learning

During the process of researching your new articles, you’re bound to learn something new. Maybe it’s some new discoveries or the latest news, but it doesn’t matter what, it’s new, something you didn’t have before, and if you weren’t writing your blog, you wouldn’t have found it!

Perhaps it’s not actually new facts that you’ve learnt, but just by reading around you’re forced to question yourself and look at things from a different perspective, either way you’re gaining.

If you’re thinking that this doesn’t apply to you as you’re blog is not technical, but more socially oriented, then perhaps you need to think again. Seeing things from someone else’s perspective could be just the inspiration you’re looking for.

So once you’ve learnt to blog, keep on going, and soon you’ll be blogging to learn. At this stage, it’s definitely a case of the more you put in, the more you’ll get out.

The moral of the story is keeping on blogging and keep on learning!

RSS feeds allow users to receive a brief description of your latest web article alerting them to your new posting, so why not consider optimising this summary to really entice readers?

RSS feeds are an excellent way of keeping people informed of the latest additions to your website. They do this by displaying a short summary of your web article in the user’s RSS reader as a teaser to your main article. But, rather than leave things to chance, wouldn’t it be better to carefully hand craft the RSS summary to maximise your chances of pulling in the reader?

Partial RSS Feeds

Some websites like to supply the entire content of their web articles in what is supposed to be the RSS summary or description field. This type of RSS feed is commonly known as a full  feed. If this seems a little confusing, then my previous article on RSS Feeds: Full Fat or Semi-skimmed, should help explain the difference between full and partial feeds in a little more detail.

If you’re a proponent of full RSS feeds, or the website that you write for operates in this fashion, then writing custom RSS summaries is not really an option for you.

However, if your website publishes its RSS feed as a partial feed (only a summary of your website article is included in the RSS feed) then writing a custom summary of your article especially for your RSS feed could be of tremendous value to you.

Automated Summaries

If your website is powered by a Content Management System (CMS), such as the popular WordPress blogging platform used on this website, then the chances are that your RSS feed will be automatically generated by the system software.

If you are supplying your RSS feed as a partial feed (just sending a summary of your article) as opposed to a full feed (sending the entire content of the article in the RSS), then the summary of your article in the feed is probably automatically lifted from the first paragraph of your article, and not even the entire paragraph at that, unless you have taken alternative action!

This is obviously not an ideal situation as, depending how punchy your first paragraph is, the chances are a much better job could be done writing a brief summary with a little extra effort. You might have spent hours working on your latest literary epic, so why not spend a few minutes more to really sell it?

Custom RSS Summaries

A good example of using custom article summaries for RSS feeds is the BBC News website. Each article on their website has a headline or title, which is used as both the RSS title and main story headline. However, the RSS feed descriptions are one line summaries of the articles, which themselves are more condensed versions of the first teaser paragraphs of the articles in question.

With the attention span of the average web user being comparable to the domestic goldfish, the advantage of using a short but snappy, carefully crafted summary of your web article for the RSS feed to instantly grab their attention should be immediately obvious.

Summarise the Summary

So next time you write a blog or web article and write a summary for the first teaser paragraph, spend a few extra minutes summarising the summary into a single line for your RSS feed (assuming you’re using partial feeds) to really grab your reader’s attention.

If you are a WordPress user, then WordPress caters for this facility with its excerpt field in each post. If this field is filled in, then its content is used as your feed’s summary for each article (if you have selected the summary option for your feed). If this field is NOT filled in, then a portion of your article’s first paragraph is taken for the RSS summary instead.

Which would you prefer? A custom summary, or a half cut up first paragraph?

So what is all the fuss about? Well, it’s all about the description field in the RSS feed and whether it should just contain a summary of the article being linked to, or the complete article in its entirety.

A Short History Lesson

RSS feeds date back to March 1999, when the first RSS feed (RDF Site Summary) was created by Netscape. While RSS now stands for Really Simple Syndication, and there have been some technical changes to the nuts and bolts of it’s operation, it still bears most of the features of the original version.

The original Netscape specification (RSS 0.9) required that the complete RSS file should be 8 kB or less and each item should have a title and link to the relevant website content, but no description of the content was catered for. The description field was added in the RSS 0.91 specification by Netscape in July 1999.

In June 2000, an alternative RSS 0.91 specification was published by UserLand Software that defined the description field (the story synopsis) as being a maximum of 500 characters in length.

Semi-skimmed

We can see from the history of RSS feeds that they were conceived to be relatively condensed files, alerting the user to the existence of new articles on chosen websites, with a brief synopsis or summary of the selected article being provided as a teaser to the main article.

So, if you want to follow the original spirit of RSS, this is the way to go, merely providing a short summary of what your article is about and letting the user decide, if they are sufficiently inspired, to click on a single link and read the full article.

A major proponent of this type of partial feed is the BBC, with their news website. One such feed on their website, by way of example, is the BBC News – Technology – RSS Feed.

Full Fat

While RSS feeds were never intended to contain the entire content of a web article, since the release of the RSS 0.92 specification in December 2000, all of the newer RSS specifications allow for the description field to be of unlimited length. This has opened up RSS feeds to the possibility of not just containing short descriptions of the articles being linked to, but the entire articles.

While RSS was never intended to be used in this way, clearly things evolve as people develop new ways of using existing technologies, constantly pushing the boundaries, which is definitely a good thing.

The blogging community was the major instigator of using RSS feeds in this fashion, although opinion is still divided with the community over which feed type is best.

An example of a popular blog utilising this type of feed is ProBlogger, whose feed can be found at: ProBlogger RSS Feed.

Which is Your Flavour?

At the end of the day, it really comes down to personal preference which feed type you prefer. Unfortunately however, it’s down to the personal preference of the feed publisher, and not you as a user, which feed type you receive: you get what you’re given!

So, until webmasters, or content management systems like WordPress, or systems like FeedBurner make it easy to subscribe to your chosen feed in either full fat or semi skimmed options, your personal choice as a user is somewhat irrelevant, you are at the mercy of the feed publisher’s personal choice.

As a purist, semi skimmed feeds are the way it’s meant to be, with feeds just containing brief summaries of articles to be found on the web. If a user likes the sound of an article, then they’re only one click away from it. These feeds also download much quicker, put less strain on servers and on the internet backbone as a whole.

However, if you like to read all of your subscribed feeds from within your chosen RSS client, without having to hop backwards and forwards to different websites to read articles, then the full fat option is definitely more your flavour. Reading full articles from within your RSS client will also be quicker, as once downloaded you don’t have to wait for the article’s web page to load. If you like the look of an article, just scroll down and carry on reading.

So how do you take yours, full fat or semi-skimmed?

Do desktop blogging clients offer any significant advantages over using the native web based WYSIWYG editors included with most blogging platforms or are they just an extra layer of fluff?

Being relatively new to this blogging malarkey, I hadn’t heard of desktop blogging clients until the other day when I was reading an article by a professional blogger Darren Rowse at ProBlogger on his “blog posting workflow“, in which he made reference to using a desktop blogging client called ecto.

While ecto was originally a Mac only client, there is now also a Windows version, however, it’s not free, and being a bit tight fisted I decided to scour the web to see what else was available for Windows.

After a bit of searching, I came across Windows Live Writer, a free blogging client for Windows from Microsoft. One quick download later and time to experiment…

Essentials

So what does a typical desktop blogging client allow you to do?

Work Off Line

The key feature of desktop blogging clients is that you can write and edit your blog posts off-line and publish or synchronise them with your blog anytime later.

If you are constantly on the move, writing your posts on a laptop where you may not always have an internet connection, then this is probably quite an attractive feature, probably enough to sell it on it’s own. However, if you’re always at home or in the office with a continuous high speed internet connection when you compose your latest literary masterpiece, then this benefit may be a little more circumspect.

Multiple Accounts

If you write for a number of blogs, then the multiple accounts feature of most desktop blogging clients will be of tremendous benefit to you. Using this feature you can instantly hop between your different blogs at the touch of a button, writing and updating posts as you go.

If your blogs are running on different blogging platforms, then using a single desktop blogging client configured with multiple accounts gives you one consistent editing interface across all of your blogs.

Speed and Efficiency

No matter what speed of internet connection you have, web based blog editors inevitably suffer delays and latency issues. The more popular your blog is, the more this may be an issue, depending on the power of your web server. Or, if your blog is on a shared server which is being hit hard, this may also slow down your blog response time.

Editing your blog posts off line is so much quicker, as you only having to connect to the internet to publish your post or to synchronise your blogging client with your blog.

Integrated Spell Checker

While most web based blog editors offer some form of spell checking, these invariably aren’t as quick, integrated or as powerful as those found on desktop systems.

Having multiple blogs on different blogging platforms will also present issues with maintaining different spell checking databases, particularly if you often add custom words to your spell checking dictionary that may be commonly used in your particular area of expertise.

In this respect, having a common spelling dictionary for use across all of your blogs has got to be a major bonus.

Key Features

• Work off line
• Handle multiple blogging accounts
• Support for different blogging platforms
• Consistent editing interface
• Integrated spell checker
• Quick and efficient

In Practice

This is my first full blog post written on a desktop blogging client (Windows Live Writer) and I must admit, I’m converted.

I only have one blog to maintain at the moment, so the multiple accounts option isn’t really important for me, but being able to work with most common blogging platforms is good, as the system just integrated seamlessly with WordPress, my chosen blogging platform.

The speed of operation, particularly writing the post piecemeal (a bit today, a bit tomorrow), was a breath of fresh air, it all just seemed so much more efficient and instant. Gone were the delays waiting for pages to refresh in the web browser.

I found the WYSIWIG editor of Windows Live Writer to be absolutely brilliant. The screen looks exactly like the post on the blog by utilising the blog theme’s stylesheet, none of this pseudo WYSIWIG nonsense of WordPress’ native online editor, which I’d always found to be a bit irksome.

Adding a table is an absolute doddle, whereas this can be a bit of a mission in WordPress without having to resort to hacking in HTML or installing a custom plugin for tables. I’ve always found this to be a serious omission with the WordPress editor.

In conclusion, I think desktop blogging clients are definitely worthwhile, making the whole process much more efficient. So, if you haven’t tried one already, don’t take my word for it, download one and had a go for yourself. I’d be interested to see how you get on.

A Selection of Desktop Blogging Clients…

To get you started, here’s a random selection of desktop blogging clients:

• Bleezer
• BlogJet
• ecto
• Qumana
• Thingamablog
• w.bloggar
• Windows Live Writer

How?

This was the easy one. After a general trawl around the web and much Stumbling, it became plainly apparent that the blogging platform of choice was WordPress.

I already had my own domain (www.richardfarrar.com), which I’d had for quite a while, however this was presently being hosted on a Windows server running ASP scripting (WordPress requires PHP scripting and a MySQL database). So…

• Step 1: Get a hosting account supporting PHP scripting and MySQL databases (supplied courtesy of Zen Internet).
• Step 2: Convert my existing site from ASP to PHP.
• Step 3: Play with WordPress themes to replicate my existing site as closely as possible.
• Step 4: Crow-bar my existing pages into static pages within the WordPress framework.

…all ready to go. All I need now is content!

Why?

Well, I’m still not exactly sure what this blogging thing is all about, but have decided to take the plunge anyway and make it up as I go along.

Over the years I’ve been guided and assisted in my journey through cyberspace by a plethora of information on the web, posted by many selfless individuals. So I guess this blog is an attempt to redress the balance and give something back to the web community.

Hopefully I’ll have something worthwhile to say. I certainty won’t be posting entries about my cat. Probably because I haven’t got a cat, but the principle would remain even if I did, so no fear if I get a kitten for Christmas…