Basics of Building a Blog

Copyright © 2013 Interactive ConnectionsCopyright © 2013 Interactive Connections
Presenter:
Kristine Neumayer Jenkins
Copyright © 2011 Interactive Connections

We praise You, Lord, for all Your digital world,
especially for Brother Blog,
who is the gift through whom You give us conversation.
And he is beautiful and radiant with great splendor,
of You Most High, he bears your likeness.
We praise You, Lord, for Twitter,
in the heavens you have made the tweet short, quick, and easy.
We praise You, Lord, for Brothers LinkedIn and Flickr,
professional and a sea of networks,
by which You cherish the photos of what you have gifted us with.
We praise You, Lord, for Sister Facebook,
filled with family and friends, news, and connections all across the globe.
We praise You, Lord, for Sister Earth,
who sustains us
with her fruits, colored flowers, and herbs.
Caroline Cerveny, SSJ-TOSF created this contemporary take on St. Francis' well known prayer,
Canticle of the Creatures. See - http://bit.ly/itbJnr for the original prayer.

Blogs are usually (but not always) written by one person
and are updated pretty regularly. Blogs are often (but not
always) written on a particular topic - there are blogs on
virtually any topic you can think of.
-Mark James Normand

• Online Diary: diarists, journalists, or journalers
• Justin Hall (1994) one of the earliest bloggers
• Term “weblog” coined by Jorn Barger on
17 December 1997
– Short term “blog” coined by Peter Merholz in a
sidebar used “we blog” which became “weblog”
• In 2004 it moved mainstream: political, news…
• Liveblogging is commenting on live events –
quickly!

Corporate blogs have become much more acceptable – and
are far more read than individual’s blogs. Why?

Basics of
Building a Blog

Considerations
Cost of Blog
Ease of Use
Modification

1. Domain Name = unique part of the blog’s
Uniform Resource Location (URL).
http://www.acyberpilgrim.org
http://www.catholicwebsolutions.com
http://spiritualpopcorn.blogspot.com

2. Types of domain extensions
http://www.acyberpilgrim.org
What other extensions are you aware of?
There are at least 14!

3. Buying a domain name
www.bluehost.com
www.godaddy.com
www.hostgator.com
Note: Check all the pricing and check again before
you commit to purchasing a domain name.

• Home Page
• About or Profile Page
• Posts
• Comments
• Categories or labels
• Sidebar
• Archives
• Header
• Footer
• Blogroll or links
• Trackbacks or
backlinks
• Pings
• Tags
• Template or theme
Go to: http://bit.ly/iLuXYw

What are the issues that you would
like covered here?

• Don’t plagiarize (Get permission first)
• Don’t commit libel against someone or
something
• Don’t spam through comments
• Don’t publish spammy posts
• Don’t be a “troll”
• Don’t hide affiliate relationships (sales)

Various types of attribution:
– Great article
– Blog Post
– Sources within your blog (photo’s)
– Quotes
– Images

The rules of copyright are a bit
blurred in the online world, but the
safest path to follow is one that errs
on the side of being more
conservative.
- Susan Gunelius, Blogging for Dummies
http://www.delicious.com/ccerveny/copyright
Teaching Copyright -
http://www.teachingcopyright.org/curriculum/hs

CC licenses are designed to give the owners of
original work a way to share that work more
freely (and allow other people to build on that
work) by protecting the owner of the original
licensed work without applying a full and highly
restrictive copyright to it.
http://www.delicious.com/ccerveny/creativecommons

1. Attribution
2. Attribution Noncommercial
3. Attribution No Derivatives
4. Attribution No Derivatives Noncommercial
5. Attribution Share Alike
6. Attribution Share Alike Noncommercial

Four most common policies published on blogs:
• Comment policy: Describes what comments
are inappropriate and how they’re moderated.
• Privacy Policy: Describes what information is
collected about visitors and how that information
be used.
• Terms and Conditions of Site Use page:
Describes legal info about your blog, such as
copyrights, availability, and warnings.
• Affiliations: If you get paid for any link or review

(SEO)

There’s actually a lot more to SEO than using
targeted keywords that match people's
search engine queries. Although keywords
are the starting point for your blog’s SEO
strategy, they can take your blog only so far.
You also need to focus on other SEO
techniques to truly grow your blog’s search
engine traffic.
- Susan Gunelius, Blogging for Dummies

FREE TRIAL

• pay for text links.
• publish links that have been paid for.
• keyword stuff.
• hide keywords.
• scrape content.
• publish content that is only links.

• What does “RSS”
stand for?
• Is a web feed format.
• Feed Reader = a tool
that ingests feeds
from multiple sources
(such as blogs) and
makes it easy to view
in one place.

Feed Reader Email

http://mackcollier.com/10-ways-you-can-use-feedburner-to-improve-your-blog/

• Subscribers – most loyal audience
• Great content will attract readers
• Make subscribing easy
• Ask people to subscribe
• Offer something in return to subscribers
• Use the FeedCount chicklet from Feedburner

9 Points To Remember

• Writing Well
• Writing Often
• Building Links
• Committing the Time
• Having Passion
• Socializing
• Reading More than Writing
• Being Comfortable With Technology
• Having Patience

How would you go about building an
online community?

• Leave comments on other blogs.
• Use the same link phrase everywhere.
• Link to content you enjoy from your own posts.
• Share content you like through social
bookmarking, social networking, and Twitter.
• Respond to comments left on your blog.
• Participate in ‘link ups’

• Commenting on other blogs.

• Responding to comments.

• Moderating comments

• Linking and tracking back
For additional info: http://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/what-why-and-
how-tos-of-trackbacks-and-pingbacks-in-wordpress/

• Inviting guest bloggers

• Searching beyond the blogosphere.

Class Process
F2F orWebinar
Blog
WikiAssignments

• Remember to go to our class blog to continue
our conversation about this topic.
• Please complete assignments for this module
posted on the class wiki before the next webinar
• If you’re behind on assignments, start fresh with
this week’s Blogging topic and “catch up” later.

University of Dayton
Institute for
Pastoral Initiatives
INTERACTIVE
CONNECTIONS

Basics of Building a Blog

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