Lets start with some basic blogging vocabulary. To understand what a blog is, you first need to know the terms blog, platform, domain, and web host. A blog is a website and the easiest website for people who are not programmers or webmasters to use.
The word Blog, which is a shortened version of weblog, generally refers to a specific type of website with a series of online articles, called posts, presented in reverse chronological order. This means the last post that you publish is presented first on the front page and prior posts of the month often show below this. When the month turns, the older posts are archived usually by month name and only a new post for the current month will show. These details can be changed by configuring certain pages in your administration panel.
Configuration simply means to change a command in the code. To keep thing as simple as possible, which is what makes blogs so easy to use, this will often be accomplished easily through a simple question and answer form. Sometimes it will actually be necessary to “code” although luckily you will often have a numbered list of instructions on a read me document and can cut and paste the code by numbers. As you learn more, this will no longer make your heart sink in dread, you will confidently explore and experiment with your blog without getting into too much trouble.
In addition to the word blog, which is a catchall for everything associated with it, there are specific meanings for parts of it, when other words are added to it. On the technical side of things, you will need a blog platform and/or a specific platform template. On the aesthetic side, you may prefer a specific blog theme or skin. On the interactive side you may need several blog plugins. Themes and plugins are not core requirements for your blog to work.
A blogging platform is the computer software program that allows you to publish posts and to update your blog. Your template is what is used to design the functional structure of your blog. Your theme is described as the look and feel of the blog, from colour scheme to font size, header picture and sidebar displays. Themes are also often called skins depending on which blog platform you use. It is relatively easy to modify a theme. It can be dicey and tricky to risk modifying the template or core code of the platform.
Plugins extend the functionality of a template making many different tasks easy to do. There are plugins that can catch spam comments, display advertisements, make it easy for people to bookmark a post, cache content, add a site map or add simple tags.
There are always two sides to a blog. The front end, or what people see on the Internet and the back end, or the blogs administration panel. The front end looks pretty good without you doing anything to improve it other than adding text to a post and deleting the sample data that is there to help you get started.
The administration panel is the control panel where you will enter a post, edit one, and publish it. It is where you can add categories and assign your posts to them, where you can add links to your blogroll, where you can choose a theme or install a plugin and where you can enter your own contact details or add other users to your blog so that it can be shared. It is also one of two places where you can configure the code to make your blog display its content in different ways.
From a non technical viewpoint, a blog is often called an online journal because many people use them to record events consecutively just as you would in a diary or journal.
Due to the many new platforms and plugins a blog can do so much more than this now and blogs are used for many purposes including business information, news publishing, novel or essay writing, commercial selling, tutorials and portfolios.
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