Full-time Bloggers

This week’s lecture has kept me thinking about how blogs has changed so much. Blogs are no longer used as a personal online diary but more of a way to share and express their thoughts and attract people of similar interest. I’ve been following a few blogs for quite some time and I’ve notice many of them have become full-time bloggers. They quit their day time jobs and concentrate fully on keeping their blogs updated. Imagine the pleasure of working from home at any hour! I would love to have that kind of job too instead of the usual 9 to 5 job sitting at the office.

It’s really great to see how much a blog could expand a person’s social network and help to create an online identity. The full-time bloggers that I know from my country earn some of their salary from writing advertisements. They get invited to opening/product events and they write about it in their blogs. They have really spend a fair amount of time to get their name known on the cyberspace so that people would instantly recognize who they are and invite them for appearances.

So sometimes it really makes me wonder what kind of identity I would create for myself to be known in the cyberspace. I rarely use my real name on the internet so Googling my name on the internet would almost return 0 matching results. I have been using my English name on the internet and friends who actually call me by my real name have associate with me in real life before. I can feel I’m having some kind of identity crisis now!

I actually went to Google on full-time bloggers and I found quite a lot of articles on becoming full-time bloggers, successful tips on blogging, etc. But one of the articles caught my eyes probably because of the title (Aha! One way to catch your reader’s attention – use interesting titles!). Here it is: ‘So I Quit My Day Job – Holy Cow! I Took the Plunge’

Week 3 Lab Activities

We did a lot for this week’s lab. We were still at the stage of setting up the blog which I have already experiment and change or add. For example we were to add a category link for a our blog. It took me some time to get used to all the links on my dashboard, clicking on each one of them to see where it leads me to. For the category link, I prefer to add new categories straight from my new post instead of navigating to the categories link.

This is what I usually do to add a new category:

Instead of this:

Next, adding the category link to the blog we have to go to Widgets under the Appearance menu and drag the Category menu to the sidebar.

It’s all pretty straightforward.

Another thing that we learn in the lab yesterday was on ‘trackbacks’ and ‘pingback’. Honestly, I did not know what these two term means at all. Gosh!

Well according this this website, it states that ‘Trackback is to let a site know that you are referencing them on your on site and the Trackback URL is different from the regular permanent link URL’.

Seth mentioned that Pingback is similar in a way. The only difference between Trackback and Pingback is how the notification is delivered. Pingback is through e-mail meanwhile, trackback is goes straight to the website itself. The other main purpose of Trackback is to increase blog traffic. Interesting!

Here’s a very useful link on using Trackback for WordPress: http://www.optiniche.com/blog/117/wordpress-trackback-tutorial/

HTML Text Formats

This post is to test what I can do with ^{HTML text formats}. I think this will be hard FUN as you don’t have to see the same size and boring text fonts. Or is this making you _dizzy?

In Week 3′s lab, we started a few basic HTML coding and I decided to explore more on my own. Let’s see what else I have tried on my own.

<b> – Bold text
<i> – Italic text
<big> – Big text
<small> – Small text
<em> – Emphasized text
<strong> - Strong text
<sub> – This is a _{Subscripted text}
<sup> – While this is a ^{Superscripted text}
<ins> – Inserted text
<del> – Deleted text

The Thing About Blogs

The point I find really interesting about this week’s lecture is the amazing wonders a blog could do. There is a whole list of what blog has done for our lecturer, Seth. Firstly, it has helped to built an online CV where Seth got his job through blogging and from there, it has expanded his social network. Besides that, blogging helps to create a professional profile both online and offline. In this society where social networks is dominating the world, the first thing people would do now is probably go online and google your name or anything related to you. Hence, blogging has been a tool to create people’s identity. Other than that, blogging is a great way to let the ideas flow. It is like a second brain where we could document our thoughts down. By writing our thoughts down in the blog, it also helps to make our thoughts clearer and we are able to sort out the complex ideas we had in our mind. These are the main points that caught my attention about blogs.