BizFractals

If you are stepping into the world of blogging, there are some things which you’ll be working with that you will need to know about.

1) Archives - Archives are used by blogs to keep a track of articles on a website. Many blogs feature an archive based on dates (monthly or daily archives). Some blogs keep archives based on categories, while others do it by author or in alphabetical order.

2) Feeds - A feed, mostly called an RSS feed, is a list of articles of a blog given in a format making it easy for to access them. This helps people interested in a particular topic to access articles from various blogs / sites who provide feeds, through a program called feedreader. Other than RSS, there are also other feed types such as Atom, RDF, etc.

3) Blogrolls - You often see this on the right side of your wordpress blog when you set it up first. A blogroll is a list of blogs which the author links to from the site, which he finds interesting, or feels that his users would like to read. The Blogroll is often listed in a sidebar, or sometimes given a separate dedicated webpage.

4) Syndication - Syndication is a method by which you make your web content available to your users. This is mostly seen in blogs and content management systems (CMS). Syndication is done using a feed - a list of articles from the site in a format which can be read by a feedreader software. Many weblogs publish a feed. Feedreaders check specified blogs to see if they have been updated and display new posts. Most blogs have these Syndication feeds available for the readers to use.

5) Managing Comments - This is one of the interesting features of blogging tools. Comments are usually open to readers of a blog, to express their views on a blog post. This is one of the ways of building communities using your blog. The moderator (you, for your own blog) has options to check each comment before they appear on the blog - which is sometimes necessary to make your blog a peaceful place.

6) Permalinks - Permalinks are the permanent URLs to the pages of your blog. There are permalinks for individual posts, comments, categories, archives, etc. Permalinks are useful for other bloggers who would like to link to your post or a section in your blog, or to send a link to your post in an email message. Because others may link to your individual postings, the URL to that article shouldn’t change.

7) Plugins - Plugins add additional features to your blog. Blog come with a set of features - plugins enhance them. You have plugins for many things such as comment management, archive management, admin tools, syndication, layout, spam control, etc. To get more idea on plugins, you can check this link out - http://wp-plugins.net/beta/ .