Pimp my Blogger

After the increase of online content through blogs, MySpace, YouTube etc, Time Magazine announced that their 2006 "Person of the Year" is you. If you've got more questions about blogging than answers, this article is for you.

What's a blog?
Basically it's whatever you like - a diary, business updates, rants, opinions, information... It's more a concept of adding whatever you want to say online.

What's the difference between a blog and a webpage?
Not much really. Generally you can add items to a blog via a form online rather than having to know all the coding. Usually this is done with a system like Blogger, WordPress, or any of the many others out there.

These companies manage all the archives, so when you create a new post, the old one is kept and listed in a links section of the page (pretty much like this page, where you have our previous posts on the left). This means you don't have to worry about uploading or moving pages around.

Why do it?
Good question! We'll it's a way you can get your message out without hassles. For us, we use it to keep our clients and prospective clients up to date with what we're doing and can do. It give us the ability to demonstrate through our website that we are a living business - and the website isn't just a limp brochure. It allows us to share with readers a bit of who we are not just what we do.

You guys are web developers, so you'd just create your own blog system?
Sure, but why re-invent the wheel? We use Blogger to manage our blog. It does all we need and we can customise it to look exactly like our site. From a visitors perspective it is our site and we can do everything we need. Customising an application like Blogger is a pretty powerful tool.

How much does a blog cost?
You can start blogging for free! You sign up with a blogging company, go through the online setup, pick a template and you're away. If you want to customise your blog, that may take a bit of technical knowledge and it you want to setup something to work with your existing site, let us know and we can help you out.

What's RSS?
Think of RSS as a bookmark. The difference is that it tells you when new articles have been added to a web page or blog and gives you a bit of a summary of what's been written. RSS is built into pretty much all the blogging software packages out there although it may be browser dependent (Internet Explorer 7 may be the first Microsoft browser that can handle RSS). Browsers like Firefox, Opera and Safari all have built in support for RSS.

If you'd like help setting up your blog or have more questions, just drop us a line.

Posted on Monday, January 15, 2007

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