A Blog About Blogs
Tres Ninos
Our little girl is 2 weeks old today! As you can see, she has some proud big brothers who sure love her. We went to church as a family of 5 this morning for the first time. Our church is our family, and it was wonderful to be there! We left our house early since we figured there might be a few people who would want to meet Sarah. Good thing we did as it took over 20 minutes to get from our minivan to the sanctuary and find some seats; there were so many people who stopped to say hi and congrats.
Now for a quick lesson on blogs (short for “web log”). If you’re interested in knowing how you can find out when our blog and others are updated without having to visit the individual web sites, keep reading. Aunt Sarah, this one is dedicated to you based on your fun comment: “Yeaaah!! Thanks!! I’ve often wondered what a ‘blog’ is.” I know I have some veteran blogging friends like Mark Horlbeck and Alan Ray who who been blogging for many years, and on the other end of the spectrum, we have friends and family who probably fit more appropriately into the “Aunt Sarah” category. Mark, Alan, and Ross, you can stop reading now 
For anyone else who’s still reading, one of the cool things about most blogs is that you can have them “pushed” to you rather than having to go to the website and see if and when there are updates - a “pull”. This is most commonly done through an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed which you subscribe to with an RSS reader. There are both web-based and client-based readers. There are readers in Outlook now and in many email sites like Yahoo, but my preferred method is through Google Reader (www.google.com/reader - requires a Google/Gmail account):
To add a new subscription/blog to your reader, all you need is the URL of the site with an RSS feed (i.e. www.woodsonline.net/blog). The blog subscriptions are managed in the bottom left panel, and a summary of unread postings is visible on the right. If you click on one of the summary headings, it pulls up the whole article. The highlighted feeds on the left are sites with new postings, and the number in parenthesis is the number of new postings. I caught up on all my friends’ blogs when we were in the hospital with Sarah two weeks ago, but I haven’t done so since then - so I have multiple unread postings. You can setup folders and filters and other things, but those are the basics. You go to one site, and you can read the new postings from all your favorite blogs.
If you’re interested in setting up your own blog, that’s relatively simple too, and you don’t have to be a computer nerd like me to do it. There are probably hundreds of blogging platforms or more, but I’ll mention a few popular ones. If you want more details, I’d suggest checking out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weblog_software and http://www.weblogmatrix.org. One of the easiest and most commonly used platforms is Google’s Blogger. If you want an easy to setup and use system, not to mention free, it’s a nice option. The features are somewhat limited (i.e. no tags or categories), but it’s about as easy as they come and will enable you to start blogging quickly. WordPress also offers a free blogging option (www.wordpress.com) where they provide the hosting, but it is financially supported through ads and paid upgrades. I happen to use the open source, self-hosted version available at www.wordpress.org - partly because I want to learn PHP and MySQL. It’s packed with features, comes with lots of online support and forums, and is fully extensible. However, you have to pay for and use your own web hosting provider, and it definitely helps to have some computer and web programming skills. I happen to use the Professional ($10/month) web hosting package from Brinkster.
Time for bed now
