Pranav Bhat- Programming, Freelancing, college and more

The other day i was chatting with one of my friends and I told him that one thing that has really hooked me on is my personal cum professional blog at pranavbhat.info and I thought he would say let me read your blog and then give you a feedback but his reply really made me fall off my chair! His reply was what is a blog? I mean come on man this is 2008 and blogs have been around for quite a while. That is when i realized that many people still might not know what exactly a blog is? So, i thought let me try and have a blog post about what exactly a blog is and what exactly blogging means to me.

By definition a blog is a web log that contains a log of anything and everything that we intend to share over the internet. As you can see in this blog of mine i share various aspects of my life and about things i am fond of and about things i am interested in; ofcourse including programming and my part time profession of freelance programming. But, people have blogs ranging from everything and anything right from pet training to making money on the internet to just about everything.

Now, there are several aspects to a blog and if you want to do blogging professionally then you need to take care of all of these aspects. Ofcourse this list is not exhaustive and there are several other aspects that i might not be aware of because as you can see its a complex subject. Now, some of the aspects of blogs that you might be doing very often are listed below:

1. Blog Post: Now, what exactly is a blog post. A blog post is what you are reading right now. A blog post typically contains an article about something that you feel you should write about or an update about you or anything that concerns you that you feel people should know from you.
2. A page: A page is something that is static and is analogous to a html web page. Ofcourse a blog post is also static and doesnt change unless you change, but blog posts are generally arranged in descending order of being posted on the blog but this is not the case with a blog page. A blog page most often can be a page to which you can append information over time like my freelance projects page where i write about the projects i do.
3. Comments: A comment is something by which you can interact with your audience which in this case are the readers of your blog. Comments in your blog are very useful and a good interaction of your readers leads to more readers and if you are monetizing your blog then more readers means more page hits which in turn means more money.
4. Feeds: Blogs are dynamic in nature. I know blogs which easily churn out 10 articles or blog posts per day and it can be very difficult sometimes for a reader to keep track of the latest article posted on his favourite blog. Thats when feeds come into use. Feeds are usually RSS feeds but most blogs produce other types such as ATOM feeds as well long with RSS feeds. Now, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and can be consumed(i.e read) by various feed readers. My favourite feed reader is the Google Reader. You can start by subscribing to my blog.

Blogs are obviously much more than i have written above and it is impossible to cover what a blog is exactly in a single blog post. Hence, i will follow up with another article that will have more advanced topics about blogging.