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BlogrollI have been getting a lot of email asking how to subscribe to the patrickWeb weblog. The simple answer is click here. While I am at it, here are a couple of paragraphs to answer some of the other most common questions I receive. I will continue to refine this over the days ahead..

What Is A Weblog?

Weblog is an abbreviation for “Web log”. An even shorter — and more common — abbreviation is “blog”. Think of a blog as an on-line diary where someone with a point of view and a desire to share it makes “postings” to his or her weblog on a regular basis. Some do their “blogging” weekly, some do it daily, some do it hourly — or even more often. A person who has an active blog is called a “blogger”. The process of converting a web site to a web site with a blog in it is called “bloggerizing”. Welcome to my bloggerized web site.

What does it mean to subscribe to a weblog?

Subscribing to a weblog is similar to subscribing to news alerts. When something changes at a blog you enjoy — when the blogger writes something new — you may want to know about it. The weblog is a new kind of publishing. There are thousands of blogs and there will be millions. When a blogger publishes something, a table of contents of all their recent postings is created. This table of contents is usually placed at the location of the blogger’s web site, typically in the /weblog directory. The name of the table of contents file is typically “http://zzz.com/weblog/rss.xml”. Unfortunately, the very competent and very technically astute people who invented all this decided to call the table of contents of a blog the rss.xml file. I think a better name would have been Webtoc — the weblog table of contents.
You can usually find the address of the "Webtoc" or feed at an icon like this ===> xml Here at patrickWeb many readers prefer to take an easier approach — you can just click here and subscribe to my blog and get a short email when I write something new. I do not make email addresses available to anyone else nor spam readers with other information. See my privacy policy and related things here.

How does a person actually read a blog?

Blogs originally were read using a blog reader (technically called an RSS reader or RSS aggregator). The analogy is that to read web pages you use a browser and to read a blog you use a blog reader. Blogs are now fully integrated in web sites.

Where do you get a weblog reader?

Just like there numerous web browsers back in the mid 1990’s, there are numerous weblog readers. Last I looked there were thirteen different ones available. See “blogspace” for a list.The most popular software tool for both bloggers and readers is Radio Userland.

How do I subscribe?

I wish I could say this was easy — some day fairly soon it will be. In the meantime, it requires a strong interest and a bit of effort. I’ll do my best here to make it as simple as possible. The most popular way to become a blogger and also to be a reader of other people’s blogs is to user software from Radio Userland. If you have Radio Userland, you can just click on a link and your Subscriptions page will appear. You can then just click the “Add ” button and my weblog will be added to your “News Aggregator” page along with the other news and weblog sources you have subscribed to.

What software is used to create blogs?

There are many web based and standalone offerings to do create and manage blogs. I have used many over the years. I recently switched to WordPress.