BeigeJournal

As I gather is common I didn’t really understand blogging until I tried it. As I write more fairly frequent, fairly short comments, I better understand the desire to do so. The weblog format is natural for that sort of thing. The notion of a frequently updated, chronologically ordered set of short pieces didn’t really mystify me before, though. What I really didn’t understand, but do now, is blogging software. I figured if you want to write, fire up Emacs or vi or Notepad or whatever and write. Why all this software? Having now spent a few weeks installing and configuring and messing with software (Blosxom, specifically), it all becomes clear.

Benefit 'o blogware number one is the ability to easily get all the usual navigational doohickeys, like the calendar, the find function, the categories list, and so on. I can just keep writing stuff and the software will automatically display a finite number of entries at a time and allow the viewer to navigate through the archives.

Benefit number two is that with a pre-written html template the software plugs your writing into and pre-written css, you can get a sharp looking site without knowing what you are doing or putting much work into it, and you can easily tinker with the look of the site just by changing two files (and maybe adding some plugins to get more features).

Benefit three is that if the pre-written theme was any good you should be getting near-perfectly valid HTML/XHTML/CSS/etc. as well as RSS out of the thing, even if you don’t know what you are doing, which is a wonderful thing for interoperability. (And I do recommend that you run your HTML through a validator and fix all those tiny nit-picky pedantic things it complains about. That way when you make a change that causes a problem, you can run it through the validator and see what it says without wading through 500 nit-picky pedantic warnings that you were too lazy to fix before.)

A fourth feature is the easy inclusion of writebacks, trackbacks, automatic weblogs.com pinger, and so on. How many sites would be trackback enabled if they were hand-hacked in vi? Not many. New features diffuse rapidly.

The amazing thing is that with zillions of bloggers all using various different but fundamentally similar blog software packages, we get things like All consuming, which checks the recently updated weblogs listed at weblogs.com for URLs pointing to books at the usual online booksellers, and, on the assumption that if you are pointing to a book at a bookseller, you must be writing about that book, gives us a near-real-time look at what books people are writing about in their blogs. This without the active cooperation of the bloggers, who need not even have heard of All consuming for it to work. It’s the sort of thing we’ve been promised for years, that in the future computers would scan the net for us to gather valuable information and report it back to us automatically. Now we are starting to see that. I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of this sort of thing in the future.