Q. How does blog work?

The blog process is fairly easy to understand. A user will call up the blog page in the browser. The page is made up of some code that has placeholders for the data. The code calls in the actual blog data from the database and spits it back out into the placeholders on the page. Adding to a blog is similarly easy. A blogger posts an entry in his or her blog online by filling in a subject line and a body of text (pretty much like when writing an e-mail). This entry is typically anything from “I just fed my cat, Ekko. Ekko rocks!” to a 1000+ word rant about how Microsoft is the very devil itself. There’s no set format, topic, or word count to reach (unlike writing a book, for instance). Depending on the user, there is usually a comments function, which is where anyone can give comment on the blogger’s posting. And that, folks, is blogging in a nutshell. Typically, people check a number of blogs on a daily or even hourly basis. You can do this in any standard web browser because blogs are just regular web pages. However, using something called RSS makes things even easier. So, what’s RSS?

Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
The clue is in the name, really. RSS is a way to publish—or syndicate—your site, and these days . . . it’s really simple! Most blogs offer this service as standard. How does it work? When a new blog entry is made, the content is fed into a database of some kind (typically MySQL, Access, or a flat text file). The script takes that data and inserts it into an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) file that is linked on the site, along with the freshly published blog. Anyone can then use an RSS reader (or aggregator) to fetch this information automatically and display it in a simple-to-read format. Easy! RSS readers are small applications whose sole purpose in life is to fetch updated information. The user can specify how often this is done, although some servers will ban you if you grab more quickly than every 30 minutes (Hello, Slashdot).

As with most software, aggregators come in two flavors: free and shareware. If you’re using Mac OS X Tiger, you have this feature built into Safari already. Firefox users should also be familiar with their browser’s RSS capabilities.

If you want a dedicated RSS reader, you have a number of options, which we’ll take a quick
look at now.

Mac OS X
NetNewsWire offers a shareware Pro version, and a free Lite version. It’s one of the most popular with Mac users and one of the oldest. Freshly Squeezed Software’s PulpFiction (www.freshlysqueezedsoftware.com/products/ pulpfiction) is also available in a Lite version for those who don’t need all the features of the full version (or those too tight to pay a few bucks for some shareware).

NewsFire
(www.newsfirerss.com) is shareware, but has some nice Mac OS X-style eye candy

Windows
FeedDemon (www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon) is one of the most popular RSS readers for Windows. It is shareware, but you get a 20-day trial period. Some other popular readers for Windows are Tristana (www.charlwood.com/tristana/reader) and

ActiveRefresh (www.activerefresh.com). A lot of these RSS readers have a podcasting browser. If you’re interested in finding out more, I suggest that you pick up a copy of Podcast Solutions: The Complete Guide to Podcasting, by Michael Geoghegan and Dan Klass (friends of ED, 2005).

Technorati
With all these blogs online, it would be pretty cool if you could search through them. The thing is, Google’s spiders take days to index a site and add it to their search engine. Luckily, Technorati is at hand. Technorati (www.technorati.com) tracks blogs in real time, meaning that as soon as you blog, your data is instantly searchable via its search engine. It’s as easy as signing up and adding some code to your blog page. At the time of writing, Technorati is tracking 16.9 million sites and 1.5 billion links in real time. That’s a lot of data! One of the chief geeks behind this service is Tantek Çelik, author of the infamous Box Model Hack and chief developer of the standards-compliant Tasman rendering engine that drove Mac IE 5.

Tags
The way Technorati can search these blogs so easily is by bloggers using tags. Tags are just words used as easy search references. You can see some of the most popular tags at www.technorati.com/tag. To use a tag, just include rel="tag" in your linked text, like so:
[tagname]
So, if you wanted to add a tag for the 80’s Saturday morning UK TV show, TISWAS, you’d
simply add the following code to your blog:
TISWAS
All you have to do then is ping the Technorati server and let it know that your blog is there. Oh, wait . . . ping?

Okay, now you know what pinging is about, and some blogging scripts (such as Movable Type)
ping automatically as you submit your new blog. For those that don’t, you can manually ping
the server by going to www.technorati.com/ping and submitting the new blog’s URL.

Another new Internet service that uses tags is the awesome Flickr.

Flickr
At first glance, Flickr is just some web space to upload your photos to, but it goes much further than that. It’s a big community, which pretty much doubles as a huge, searchable image bank. Users add tags to their pictures, which allow anyone to search for those terms.

Movable Type
Movable Type (MT) is one of the oldest and most established blogging tools around today. While it might be a little quirkier than some of its newer competitors, it provides its users with a great deal of power and flexibility. In fact, as well as powering tens of thousands of blogs, Movable Type is starting to be adopted as a full-fledged content management system, powering everything from small brochure sites to corporate intranets.