The World's Longest 'Quick Post'

This is just a quick post for anyone who might be interested in creating a blog or posting photos or whatever. It's just some really simple information on how to do these things and where to go etc..

Creating a Weblog or "Blog"

Creating a weblog (like this one) is simple and entirely free. All you need is internet access and that's about it. Actually you probably also need an email address but you've likely already got that. There are several places you can go to create a blog for free. They all have different strengths and weaknesses, but for the novice it doesn't really matter. For a more proper and thorough description click here.

Some of the free choices are:

Microsoft's MSN Spaces - which gives a more "windows" like page. It's has pre-built lists for favourite music and I think you can store a photo album on your blog as well. I registered for a space click here to see it, but there's nothing there quite yet. It's kind of pre-built and you fill stuff in. I'm not sure how customizeable it is.

Blogger (this one) - this is the one I use. It's owned by Google and is fairly simple to use. You just set up your own free account, pick a template (a page style and layout) from a bunch of pre-existing ones and then start posting. It's pretty simple to do and really takes only a few minutes to set up a page and start posting. You can modify the page all you want after if you know anything about HTML, or just leave it alone and just start posting to it.

LiveJournal - this is another free service similar to Google. I've never used it so I'm not sure how good it is. It has a free version and then a pay upgrade which gives some more features.


Some terms that require a little explanation:

A blog is simply a web page that usually appears in reverse chronological order, so that the most recent entries are at the top. They can be very personal, news oriented, specifically focused on one topic, or about anything. They are set up both by individuals and businesses. Blogs can contain just text, or pictures or videos to download or just about anything. Most of the ones I read are mostly text (like news stories etc..). There are blogs on almost any topic you can imagine. You can blog about some topic you like, or use it just to let everybody know how you are doing.

RSS - really simple syndication. This is a really powerful tool. You can visit a blog just like any other website, but most blogs (and almost any news site) also provide something called an RSS feed. This is a piece of information made available from your blog to everyone else so that people can be notified if you update your site and what the update is.

RSS Aggregator - This is a program (either installed on your local computer or online) that scans the internet for any RSS feeds you've subscribed to and notifies you if any of them have been updated since you last read them. All this is done without you going to any sites. Effectively you can build a newspaper from all the sources you want without ever visiting them and it's kept up to date constantly. For instance, CBC has several RSS feeds you can subscribe to such as World Headlines, Sports, National News etc.. that will feed you the headlines as they appear. And you just check your aggregator and shows you which ones have been updated and shows you the updates, so most times you don't even have to go to the specific site. So someone could subscribe to the feed from this site and be notified and shown the update in their aggregator without even lifting a finger to check in here.

I use an online aggregator called Bloglines which is free. It's easy to subscribe to rss feeds just by copying an rss feed address from the site (look for a small orange rss logo on the site) and pasting it into bloglines when you add a feed. That's all there is to it. So I can check if anything I regularly read has been updated and I can check this from whatever computer I'm at since it's online.

How to post photos: Well there isn't a huge amount I know about right now. I have started using Flickr since it has kind of a neat online gallery that lets you store photos in different sets and lets users view a slideshow. And it doesn't really give any limit to the storage you can use. I use something called Hello from Blogger that comes as part of Picasa (both also owned by Google now) and this lets me upload any photo directly from my pc. I think that in order for me to put a photo right in the page here I still have to use the Hello tool. I'm not sure if there is any easier way at the moment in Blogger. Of course if you sign up for a free MSN Spaces blog then it might be easier on that service.

In any case, if you want to just store photos online for others to see, use Flickr. If you want to post photos into a blog you can use Hello (if you use Blogger) or some other means if you use MSN Spaces or something else. I'm still really just fiddling around with this so there might be some much simpler way I don't know of yet.

Well that's likely a hell of a lot more than a quick post... Of course there is a lot more to it, but I really don't know a heck of a lot more than that and it works just fine for me. If anything still seems utterly confusing then post a comment to this post to discuss it. Or email me at: rfquerin@gmail.com or rico.jd@primus.ca The gmail.com account is nice because it will forward emails it receives to both my work and home email automatically.