This short tutorial is planned to:

• Introduce you to blogs, blogging and touch on RSS
• Help you set up a blog
• Prompt you to think about the ways in which you could use a blog, for yourself, your work and your professional development
• Help you customise your blog

There are a wide range of resources about these topics, so rather than re-create them, much of this session will refer to other resources.

How Blogs Work

A lot of people start (and stay) with one of the free hosted blogging services such as Blogger or Motime. In this scenario, the blog is hosted by a company on their server space. The basic systems can be free; for a fee many services offer additional or advanced features such as picture storage.

Anatomy of a Blog

Screenshot with the main sections labelled. Thanks to Robin Petterd for permission to use his blog as an example.

Each entry to a blog is called a 'post'. Usually the main page of a blog is arranged in descending chronological order. Each post has a title and a body. You can have multiple posts on the one day, or one every few weeks. Totally up to you. 

---- >>>> next page

 

List of Webpages referred to in the audio files

George Siemen's elearnspace blog: http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/ 

My Toolkit blog: http://www.otheredge.com.au/klogs/toolkit/ 

Angela Kaufman's Class blog: www.swaggiesebusiness.blogspot.com

Will Richardson, Read-write web: http://www.weblogg-ed.com/ 

This tutorial is licensed under a Creative Commons License.