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Jullie weten nog wel dat we sinds kort schrijven voor de plaatselijke "Libelle". Onlangs ging het bij mij over blogs en bij Pille over deeltijds werken. Het tijdschrift verschijnt in het Ests, maar ik heb m'n originele tekst natuurlijk nog in het Engels...

" Your family on the Internet, the easy way…

Keeping your family and friends up-to-date on what happens in your life can be quite a task. Most of the time you are too busy to visit or call everyone you would like, and before you know it, you realise that you haven’t seen this or that friend in a very long time. Especially when friends and family live far away from you, it is hard for them to keep up with what you are doing and experiencing.

If you want to do more to share those special family moments, thoughts and comments with the people around you, one easy way is by keeping a blog on the Internet.

Blog?

A blog – short for weblog – can easiest be described as a diary or scrapbook on the Internet. On a blog, you can write anything you want and illustrate it with your own pictures. Readers can easily leave comments, and keep up with all the news you want to share.

Blogs are becoming increasingly important, with over 60 million blogs existing today. Most of these are personal, but some also bring together amateur journalist or political commentators. Some of these have become active and vibrant discussion forums, with thousands of visitors every day, and are an important force in opinion
making next to for example radio, “classic” Internet sites, newspapers and television.

The existence of blogs also brought its own vocabulary: keeping a blog for yourself (or “blogging”) makes you a “blogger”. Writing things on a blog for others to read is called “posting”, and all blogs together are called the “blogosphere”.

Blogs can really be about anything. If you want to have a look at some, the website blog.tr.ee points you to blogs written in Estonian and is a good place for inspiration.

How to…?

Ready to join the blogosphere and become a blogger yourself? One reason why blogs are so popular is that they are very easy to make and to maintain, and there is
absolutely no reason for you not to try it yourself. Even if you think you don’t know enough about computers.

To make a blog of your own, all you really need is an Internet connection and an e-mail address. There are many different sites on the Internet that let you start your own weblog, and most of them are completely free of charge. My favourites are Blogger.com and WordPress.com. They are easy to use, and let you learn everything there is to know while you are actually doing it. Everything happens online, so there is no need to install software on your computer. They also have a lot of users, which makes it easier to find an answer to any question you might have: chances are that somebody else already had the same question and that the answer is already there for you.

Best of all, Blogger and WordPress are two of the many sites that come with free “hosting”. That means that you can start a blog in minutes, completely for free and without having to know anything about things like domains, making your own website, or finding a good webhost.

And now what?

So, now you are ready to make a blog of yourself. But what do you want to post?

It is a good idea to think a bit about what sort of things you want to write about. Even if you are reading this because you want to use a blog to share things about your family and yourself, you may eventually also want to start writing about your hobbies, or about the books you read, or to share recipes. Or indeed, about anything that comes to mind – there is really no restriction to what you can write about. If you feel that one topic does not really fit with another, it can be a good idea to keep more than one blog. Most blogging sites allow you to keep as many blogs as you want without having to register more than once, so it is easy to make an extra one any time you want.

A picture speaks a thousand words. Adding pictures to illustrate your stories is usually not a problem; most blogging sites make it easy to add pictures and even to put them in the text, just like you would see in a magazine article. However, if you want to share a lot of pictures over the Internet, it is easier and more effective to use other sites for that. Having too many pictures in your blog generally doesn’t look very nice, and readers with a slow Internet connection could have trouble loading your pages. Websites like shutterfly.com, picasa.com or myphotoalbum.com let you put pictures on the Internet in the form of online photo albums, so your friends and family can see them and even order prints. And of course, you can easily include a link to your online photo album in your blog posts.

While most blogging software lets you use pictures in a post, it is usually not possible to use video or other files, but again, you can easily use other websites for that.

One important thing you should keep in mind when posting on your own blog is that it is (in principle) a public thing – what you write is part of the Internet, out there for everyone to see.

There are some tricks to make it harder for people to find your blog (you can for example make sure that it doesn’t get listed by search engines such as Google), and it is up to you to decide if you want to allow people to add comments or not. Still, it is important to understand that not just your friends can read what you post, but anyone who finds it, be it your colleagues, your employer, or anybody else. It is therefore not a good idea to reveal too much information about yourself, or to write
things that you only want your close friends or relatives to know.

There are some examples of people who have been fired because of what they wrote in their blogs, and what for you may be a nice picture of your child taking a bath might have a completely other meaning to somebody else. Generally speaking, it
is a good rule not to write anything that you don’t want to be heard saying in public.

Hear the news!

Of course, you want everyone to know about your shiny new online journal. The easiest way is to give your friends and family the Internet-address of your blog (you get that address when you create one) and to ask them to add that link to the favourite pages in their Internet browser. That way, they can easily check for news whenever they are online. If you allow visitors to post comments, you may even get some nice reactions and feedback to what you write.

There are also some more elaborate ways to keep track of blogs and to get a signal when there is a new post (such as “real simple syndication” or RSS), but these generally require that you are a bit Internet savvy in order to use them.

Some words of caution and comfort…

Making a backup copy of a blog is not a very easy thing to do, so make sure that you don’t rely on your blog to store those pictures you like so much. The same goes for most things you keep on the Internet - always make a backup copy of what you don’t want to lose.

Blogs too sometimes fall victim to what is called “spam” – messages you haven’t asked for and don’t want to receive. People who send “spam” use computers to look for blogs and to automatically send in lots of comments to a post, containing nothing but nonsense or commercials for products you should not be buying through the
Internet. Most blogging sites offer good and simple ways to protect yourself from “spam”. Use them, if you don’t want to see your blog overflow with hundreds of unwanted messages.

And finally, the Internet can be a lonely place, and posting things on a blog is something different than calling someone or sending them a mail. Don’t get discouraged if people don’t send comments to what you write – it doesn’t mean they don’t read it. If you want to know how many people actually read your blog, you can use something called a “site meter”. It is easy to do, and it lets you keep track of how many people visited your blog and even where they were coming from. Examples of some free site meters are clustrmaps.com and sitemeter.com, but there are hundreds more to be found on the Internet.

Useful information

http://www.blogger.com
http://www.wordpress.com
examples of blogs (in Estonian): http://blog.tr.ee "

Bovenstaande tekst is wat ik zelf heb ingestuurd naar het tijdschrift. De uiteindelijke versie is natuurlijk bewerkt, aangepast en vertaald naar het Ests.

Opgelet! Het auteursrecht (copyright) van deze tekst berust bij de uitgevers van het magazine. Je mag de tekst dus niet overnemen, bewerken, vertalen of anderzijds verspreiden zonder hun toestemming.

Sorry, dat moest er even bij...