Weblogs: instant web publishing

ONE OF the commendable impacts of the Net is that it has created a resource sharing culture that is based on respecting others' needs and a willingness to offer whatever one has to others. As Mr. Eric Steven Raymond, the Open-source evangelist, says in one of his popular articles (available at: http://tuxedo.org/esr/writings/cathedral- bazaar/homesteading.sgml), in the Net world your status is "determined not by what you control but by what you give." This week, we will look into the phenomenon of 'weblogs', whose base can be traced to the Net's dominant culture of sharing one's resources/ideas with others.

Weblogs

Imagine that during a Net travel you come across a site that has some unique information, which you feel will be useful to the community of which you are a member. You immediately publish the link (with your comments) in your site so that your community members can access it from anywhere at anytime. This process of publishing links with comments is called web logging and the page that contains your postings is called a weblog or blog. Blogging takes the concept of personal web pages a step further - here you instantaneously dish out some valuable piece of information with your comments/observations and organise all the posted information in a chronological order. This means, to make the weblogging exercise worthwhile and keep the process going successfully with a reasonably good audience, you should keep on updating it (at least once a day).

Weblog is a tool through which you can present your views and thoughts on various things and it can be considered a self- expression vehicle - your weblog tells the world who and what you are. If you are a professional, this is an excellent as well as super-fast way to communicate and share your discoveries/thoughts/unearthed Net-resources with your peers spread across the globe.

How to create a weblog

There are many services available in the Net that help you create and maintain a weblog. They are generally called bloggers (or webloggers). Some of the on-line free services that let you publish a weblog are:

Blogger: Blogger is a popular service that provides you many tools which facilitate publishing weblogs instantaneously in your web server without any hassle. To start the process, sign-up with the service at: http://www.blogger.com. Once signed-up, log-in to it and at this point you will be presented with an interface that has all the necessary tools to create and publish a blog. To start a new weblog, click at the `Create a new web log' icon. Provide the necessary information, such as `Title' and weblog 'Description'.

The service allows you to publish the page in your web server, if you have access to one; otherwise it helps you publish a weblog in its own server 'blogspot.com'. So, select the option appropriate to you. I have created a demo weblog using the option `Host at BlogSpot'. If interested, you may check out the site at: http://netspeak.blogspot.com.

Now, please do not think that, every time you want to post an entry into the blog, you need to sign-in to the Blogger site and invoke the button that contains your blog's name. The service presents you the option to attach a button named 'BlogThis!' into your browser's tool bar, which can be used to publish your weblogs anytime you browse the Net without getting into the Blogger site.

Once you install the button in your tool bar, to update your blog, just click at the 'BlogThis!' button and feed the necessary information into the window that pops up. Thereafter, you can publish your thoughts by just pushing a button and typing the content into the appropriate interface boxes - no need to know anything about the web sites/HTML/FTP etc!

There are many more on-line services that accomplish this task of launching and updating weblogs. Some of them are: Xanga.com (http://www.xanga.com), a service brought to my attention by Mr. Chandan, a reader of NetSpeak, that lets you start a weblog of the form http://www.xanga.com/netspeak (here, netspeak is the username which I selected while registering with the service).

You may also check out the services such as Pitas (http://web.pitas.com/) and DiaryLand (http://diaryland.com).

If you want to know more about the weblogs, please visit the sites Robotwisdom (http://www.robotwisdom.com/weblogs) and Weblog Madness (http://www.larkfarm.com/weblog-madness.htm).

Group mail

I am sure you must have received mails addressed to you along with a group of people for a common cause. Most of them would have reached your mailbox in a non-customised fashion without any personal touch - mails with copies to numerous other group members. While sending group mails this way serves its purpose it puts you in the class of an unskilled e-mailer. Do you want to send customised group e-mails without indulging in any technical tweaking of your e-mail client? Here is a simple and free software that helps you do this. Download the program from the site http://www.infacta.com/ and install it. Before sending mails through the program, you need to provide it some information such as the SMTP address of your mail server and ISP's DNS address (click the 'Setup', then 'Email Setup'). As it has an excellent help facility, I do not want to go into further configuration/running details of the program.

Net Kidoos

You do not need more than common sense to realise that it is almost impossible to keep abreast of the developments in the fast changing cyber world. IT professionals are no exception in this regard and in fact the scenario is graver in the case of a software person as he/she has to learn/unlearn techniques and skills continuously.

One way to smoothen out this hard programming turf is to incessantly interact with peer group members, employing/harnessing all the communication tools available such as subscribing to related mailing lists, participating in discussion forums and the like.

In this regard, I would like to bring to your attention the portal .Net Kidoos, launched by 'PIT Solutions'. This is a portal for software developers and it is aimed at generating more interaction among the developer community. If you are a programmer working on Microsoft .Net technologies (http://www.microsoft.com/net/), you will find quite valuable links/information from this site. If interested, check out the site at: http://www.pitsolutions.com/kidoos. The site can also be accessed from the 'Events' section of the site at: http://www.pitsolutions.com.

Mr. Siddhartha Reddy, a NetSpeak reader recently informed me that he had created a mailing list for the NetSpeak readers. If you want to subscribe to the list, either send a mail to the address: mailto:inetspeak-subscribe@listbot.com or visit the site at: http://inetspeak.listbot.com.

J. Murali

(The author can be contacted at: murali27@satyam.net.in)

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Science & Tech
Next     : Fourth spatial dimension in plants found