Blogging
for beginners

What is a blog?

The term "Blog" is a contraction of "web log" (think of Star Trek's "Captain's Log"), and is a regularly-updated website, where entries are added in chronological order, and displayed in reverse chronological order. In essence, a blog is an online diary. Blogs cover an enormous range of subject matter, from political commentary to inane ramblings about collecting garden gnomes. In recent years, blogs have become an important source of information from areas of conflict where more traditional media are compromised. Blogs can contain text, still images, video, animation and sound.

A random sample of blogs

Irish blogs:

Present Tense (by Shane Hegarty - a companion to his regular columns in the Irish Times)
The Chancer (sort-of satirical look at popular culture and politics)

Eye-witness blog:

Baghdad Burning (one of thousands of blogs from Iraq)

Celebrity blogs

Stephen Fry When he's not selling you tea, or being brainy on demand ...
Go Fug Yourself Blogging about celebrities, not by celebrities.

Special interest blogs:

Whether it's cuddly toys or atonal music, there's a blog out there ...
The Bathroom Blogfest Honestly, you couldn't make it up.

Personal diary blogs:

Just because you have nothing to say, doesn't mean you don't want to say it to the world anyway. Raccoons in your boiler room? Gotta tell the planet ...
Who reads these blogs?

Yes, there's a lot of blog-rot out there, which is why you can now buy these.

Automated blogging environments

Because the notion of expressing yourself to the world in a diary format has become so popular on the Internet, the art of blogging has been simplified by services which automate the process of setting up a blog-type website, saving you the bother of designing and implementing one from scratch.

Blogger, as the name implies, is one such online environment that helps you to create your own blog. It is owned by Google.
The Blogger web site

Characteristics of a typical blog

• The blog format assumes that the blog will be updated regularly by the blog-owner, and visited regularly by its readers to read the latest update.
• Each posting has the date at the top and a "signature" to tell you who posted it.
• The posts run in reverse chronological order, i.e., the most recent is always at the top.
• The home page may contain several posts.
• At the end of each post, visitors can leave comments, which will be displayed on screen.
• The sidebar usually contains links to previous posts in the current month, and links to archives of posts from previous months.

Each of these features is supplied by the pre-configured template that blog-owner has chosen for his/her blog, or by the settings s/he has configured for it within the online blogging environment. They are features that make sense for a diary-based web site. They are not usually found on a "brochure" web site, i.e. a site designed to inform the visitor about a business, product or service.

Why would an artist want a blog?

Even in its most usual form, i.e. with the dates, signatures, comments, archives etc., a blog could be a useful tool for many artists. In some cases, blogging might actually form part of their practice.

Or a group of collaborating artists might use a blog as a sort of notebook, to discuss developments and show work to each other, particularly if they are living at some distance from each other. You can easily configure a blog so that it can be edited by all the members of a group, and limit the comment facility to group members also. For example, this is the blog we used when planning our last exhibition.

However, even if you just want to make a simple brochure site, with a few images of your work, an artist statement and a CV, it is possible to modify the template and settings for your blog to create that.

Typical blog features you might want to omit in a brochure web site

• We don’t need a date on each page - the date we add each new page is not important to viewers of our site. Similarly, we don’t need to attribute every piece of content on our site by adding a "signature".
• We want our home page to stay constant, and not to be replaced every time we add another new page to our web site.
• We don’t want all our posts to run together into a continuous page - instead, we want each posting to create a separate web page which we can then link to from elsewhere within our web site.
• It is possible (likely even?) that we do not want to invite or display comments from site visitors.
• We don’t need a list of archives or previous postings in the sidebar. Instead, we want to include links for navigating the site - a link to the home page, to our cv, to our artist statement, and to a gallery of images of our work.

Why would I want to customise a blog to make it into a brochure web site instead of just creating a brochure web site from scratch?

Obviously, using a blog to make a brochure web site involves compromise. You will be choosing the look of your web site from a limited range of pre-set options, and you will not have complete control of the layout of your site either. But tweaking a blog does offer some significant advantages to the beginner:

• It is free.
• You don't have to learn how to write code, such as HTML/XML, or even how to use a HTML editor like Front Page or Dreamweaver, to be able to create a web site.
• You can modify your website from any computer with Internet access.

All in all, a modified blog can be a very good place to start your presence on the Web.

What do I want to include in my brochure web site?

For the purposes of this workshop, we are going to keep the site very simple, and just include four areas:

• A home page
• Some sort of statement about our work
• A CV or biography
• A gallery page, showing images of our work.

Here is a simple brochure site that I have set up in Blogger, which has these sections.