Glass Pen Demo Blog

What is a blog?

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Most simply, a blog is a way for you to put content up on your own website without needing anyone else to code or edit it for you.

From Wikipedia:

A blog (an abridgment of the term web log) is a website, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. ...

Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. ... The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual...

Free blog services allow anyone to sign up for an account and keep a blog, updating it with whatever kind of content they choose.

Blogs can be used as websites or added on to a website to provide easily updated content.

Why have a blog on a website?

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A blog is something the website owner can update easily. This means that content can be immediately added or changed at will, without any need to contract further services from the web designer.

Having a blog on a free service means that you never need to worry about maintenance; the staff of the service takes care of all that.

A blog is especially useful for posting time-sensitive information, like the introduction of new products or upcoming events.

Which way to display your blog

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Blog entries can be embedded in a site--that is, copied in as the content of a site page--or a blog can be linked to from your site, so that readers view the entries on the blogging site instead. If there is a carrot and a tomato at the top of this page, you are viewing the embedded blog. If the whole page is white with the header "Glass Pen Demonstration Blog", you are viewing the blog on the blogging site. If you are viewing the embedded version and would like to see how the blog looks on its own server, click on the title of the entry, "Which way to display your blog". You are now viewing this individual entry on the blogging site. Hit your back button or click here if you want to go back.

If you wish readers to have immediate access to all blog features such as commenting or searching for old entries, your site should simply link to the blog. If your entries are likely to be mostly informational, and not something readers will comment on very often, then embedding them on one of your site pages is the best option.

One drawback of linking to a blog is that it will look different from your site, and this can sometimes confuse readers. A blog can be made to closely match the appearance of your website, but this carries an extra fee of $100, plus $15 per year on Wordpress.

One drawback of embedding is that entries drawn from the blog are "cached", or stored on your own server. This is done to keep from overwhelming the blog server with real-time requests for copies of the most recent entries. This means that new entries or changes to older entries may not show up for as much as an hour.

Which option you choose should depend on what you want to do with your blog.

Which service to use

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Two of the most popular free blogging services are WordPress and Blogger. They each offer something a little different, and Glass Pen tries to match the client's needs with the service best suited to them.

WordPress and Blogger services at a glance.

WordPress	Blogger
Greater control of your blog and account More pre-packaged themes Categories, tags and a link to the comments in embedded blogs	Simpler interface Easier access to customize themes Images in embedded blogs

Writing in your blog

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When a customer wishes to have a very simple blog and interface, or to include images in their embedded blog posts, Glass Pen makes an account for them with the Blogger service. Blogger has a simpler interface than WordPress and fewer options for organizing posts, but it allows images to appear through feeds. Blogger provides one gigabyte of storage for images, or you can store images on your own domain and link to those in your blog.

Blogger is a service provided by Google. If you already have an email account ending in gmail.com, then you can use that email address and account password to create a Blogger account.

To write a post, you need to sign on, which you can do at the Blogger homepage. The log in form is at the top right:

This takes you immediately the the Dashboard, which shows your blog controls. To write a post, click on the "Write Post" link at the lower left. You can see the cursor by that link in this screenshot:

This takes you to the Create page of the Posting tab, where you can write your entry into the form provided:

When you have finished your post, just click the orange "Publish Post" button. If you want to save it to finish later, click the blue "Saved" button to make sure you save the latest addition. This will save it as a "draft", which you can edit and publish later.

The lower right of your Dashboard contains links to manage Posts, Settings and Layout. Clicking on the "Posts" link will take you to a list of your published and draft posts so that you can edit them.

Blogger provides tags for you to organize your posts with. These can make it easier to locate particular groups of older posts. The tags can be typed into the window at the bottom of the "Create" posting form, marked with "Labels for this post:".

Blog Purpose

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This is the demo blog used by Glass Pen Webdesign.