Blogs

Blogs or web logs are a good way to record information as it happens - in many cases they can be described as a web diary. Because blogs are so easy to set up they are increasingly used on the Internet by people recording their views on a variety of subjects, recording information about a holiday etc.

This blog is created using Blogger - http://www.blogger.com/ .

I am using the Information technology and local history blog to record information about a number of different IT projects. It is not a manual but the information on a variety of technology related topics posted at different times will hopefully provide help people undertaking similar projects or provide ideas for projects.

Each post (block of information or message) is given a label which helps readers of the blog locate information on a specific topic. The list of labels can be found in the panel on the left border of the page. Clicking on a label will take you to the posts that been allocated that label.

Increasingly people are using RSS readers to keep track of new postings in a blog. There are many ways of doing this. One RSS reader is Bloglines - http://www.bloglines.com/ . Log on to Bloglines and paste the url for the blog (for this blog the url to paste is http://itlochist.blogspot.com/ ) in the blog or url feed box and then click the subscribe button. The feeds (links to new posts) from selected websites collected by Bloglines can be accessed on any computer with Internet access by logging into Bloglines.

Recent editions of the browser, Firefox, show a small square orange symbol in the right hand corner of the url search box. Clicking this symbol allows you to subscribe to a blog directly using an RSS reader such as Bloglines. Alternatively, if you regularly use the same computer you can add the link to the blog using the Live Bookmark option so it appears in a toolbar on your browser. Latest editions of Internet Explorer also have this feature.

The advantage of using an RSS reader or link to a site such as a blog is that you can be alerted whenever new information is posted in the blog without the need of having to regularly check the blog itself.

At the end of each post in this blog you will find a section where comments can be made about the information in the post. Readers will however need to be logged into Blogger to post a comment.