How To Create A Blog

 by: Christos Varsamis

Blogs are more permanent than posts to an online discussion list, more dynamic than older-style home pages. They are more personal than traditional journalism, and definitely more public than diaries. A blog is often a mixture of what is happening in a person's life and what is happening on the Web, a kind of hybrid diary site. So, there are as many unique types of blogs as there are people.

Blogs enable interaction and invite others to reward a person’s creative effort with feedback. They weave new social networks, introducing people with common passions. Another reason why one should start blogging is dissemination of "micro-opinions" important to a small audience – opinions that would never make it in newspapers.

Weblogs, definitely, are the mavericks of the online world. Two of its greatest strengths are their ability to filter and disseminate information to a widely dispersed audience, and their position outside the mainstream of mass media.

The XHTML family can accommodate extensions through XHTML modules and techniques to develop new XHTML-conforming modules. These modules permit the combination of existing and new feature sets when developing content and when designing new user agents.

With so many different ways to access the Internet, the XHTML family is designed keeping in mind the general user agent interoperability. Through document profiling mechanism, servers, proxies, and user agents are able to create best effort content transformation. This language is both RSS and XML conforming. The content can be readily viewed, edited, and validated with standard XML tools. XHTML documents can utilize applications (e.g. scripts and applets) that rely upon either the HTML Document Object Model or the XML Document Object Model.

InstaBlog

http://instablog.hit.bg/

InstaBlog appeared as a result of two things: responding to the simplest possible way to maintain a weblog, and trying out the extremely cool Perl MSN IM client. InstaBlog functions in the following manner: it is run as a background process on a machine with Internet access. With its own Passport identification it is constantly logged into the MSN instant messenger service.

OpenJournal

http://www.grohol.com/downloads/oj/

OpenJournal is a completely Web-based interface. The software’s features include: automated file creation; automated index updating; editing of all files through a Web-based interface; entries with or without titles and time posted; automated archiving based on a weekly or monthly format. All done through ordinary text files and no additional perl modules are needed to run it. Basically, the software allows the users to keep an online journal, customize and configure it. All needed to do after installation is to write in it from time to time.

BlogBack

http://www.tecknik.net/blogback/

Comment system that does not require server installation.

Enetation

http://www.enetation.co.uk/index.php?

Free hosted commenting system

BloggerBot

http://www.fibiger.org/bloggerbot/

AIM client for Blogger.

dotcomments

http://www.foreword.net/

Free PHP-based comment system for use on Blogger-backed and other weblogs.