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-- the "Nuts n' Bolts" By Total Love In Christ Ministries This column will deal with creating |
* Click for Volume Index * August 15, 2006 |
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-- the "Nuts n' Bolts" By Total Love In Christ Ministries This column will deal with creating |
* Click for Volume Index * August 15, 2006 |
Enhancing and Expanding Your Site: Part III (final) Welcome back to Volume 9. With God's Good Grace, this information and these tools (IF implemented), should begin to get traffic flowing to your site. Remember, WEB traffic is like planting -- you plant the seeds and then have to wait patiently for the crop. The additional seed then produces more plants, more seed, etc. Today we will be discussing more site enhancements and ways to attract additional traffic, including Blogs, RSS Feeds and Article Submission.
What are Blogs?
The word "blog" is derived from the combination of the two words -- web and log.
Blogs are virtual diaries created by individuals and stored on the Internet. Blogs generally consist of text and images and can appear in a calendar type format.
Blogs are located on websites which enable people to join as members and create and publish their blogs and diary entries. Blogs can be viewed either by the general public or select groups of people, such as friends.
Blogging happens when somebody uploads information to the blog and the person doing this is known as the blogger. Blogs can easily be created without any specific technical knowledge.
One excellent, FREE blogging site [ blogger.com ] is listed below. It offers a variety of design templates, and for the technically proficient, the templates can be further customized.
What is RSS?
RSS is a Web content syndication format. Its name is an acronym for "Really Simple Syndication". RSS is a dialect of XML. All RSS files must conform to the XML 1.0 specification, as published on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) website.
Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way.
About Feeds
Many websites have links labeled "XML" or "RSS" or "Atom". All of these are ways of saying that you can find out about updates to that site without having to browse to it yourself to check.
This feature is referred to as Syndication or Aggregation, or sometimes it's just called Subscribing. On some sites, instead of a link, they'll have an orange button that says RSS or XML, and looks a lot like this: How do I start using RSS feeds?
In general, the first thing you need is something called a news reader or news aggregator. This is a piece of software that checks RSS feeds and lets you read any new articles that have been added to them. There are many different versions, some of which are accessed using a browser, and some of which are downloadable applications. Browser-based news readers let you catch up with your RSS feed subscriptions from any computer, whereas downloadable applications let you store them on your main computer, in the same way that you either download your e-mail using Outlook, or keep it on a web-based service like Hotmail.
Once you have chosen a news reader, all you have to do is to decide what content you want to receive in your news reader, by finding and subscribing to the relevant RSS feeds. Many weblogs make content available in RSS. A news aggregator can help you keep up with all your favorite weblogs by checking their RSS feeds and displaying new items from each of them.
This column will conclude the "Nuts-n'-Bolts" technical aspect of WEB Design, Building and Promoting. We will begin in the next column to set our focus on Content and Spiritual Direction.
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