Datasheet

20
Part I: Getting Started with Blogs
• Information about the author: Because blogs are so personal, some-
times you want to know more about who’s writing them. Many
bloggers know their readers are curious, and those bloggers put
together short bios and other information for readers. Bloggers
sometimes display this information in the sidebar or link to it, like
in Figure 1-9.
• RSS feed link: Readers can use RSS, or Really Simple Syndication,
to subscribe to your blog by using a newsreader, such as Google
Reader. After a reader subscribes via RSS, he or she can read the
latest updates via the newsreader instead of visiting your blog. So,
your readers don’t have to visit your blog several times a day to
see whether you’ve updated it. A blog often includes an RSS link
(identified by a small orange icon, as shown in Figure 1-10) near
the bottom of the sidebar. I talk more about RSS in Chapter 13.
Figure 1-9:
An About
the Author
section.
Courtesy of Rose Levy Beranbaum,
author of The Cake Bible (William Morrow).
Figure 1-10:
A link to an
RSS feed.
Courtesy of Rose Levy Beranbaum, author of
The Cake Bible (William Morrow).
Getting a Blog Started
One of the reasons that so many blogs exist is that you can set them up and
publish them so easily. The early days of the Internet were full of heady talk
about the democratization of publishing; people discussed how absolutely
anyone would have the power to publish because of the prevalence of
personal computers. In fact, that idea wasn’t strictly true. A writer no longer
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