Every day I’ll pick a Internet-related term and try to explain it in plain English. If you know of a term to you would like me translate from geek to English, let me know
Today’s term is a part of a series that focuses on Web 2.0 related terms

I’m not exactly sure that this term truly qualifies as a Geeky term as lately it seems like blogs are going mainstream…but I just realized that I had to explain to my hubby exactly what I was doing while I’m writing my blog posts so….

The word “blog” is actually a short way of saying “web log” or “weblog”…and basically a blog is a web site that’s written like an online journal, with time stamped and dated entries in reverse chronological order…or listed from the newest entry to the oldest. If you’re reading this right now..guess what…you’re reading a blog.

The beginning of the very first blogs began waaay back in 1994, when groups of people created online diaries in order to chronicle the their daily goings ons. This group of people who called themselves diarists created a community called Open Pages. Eventually these personal diaries evolved from just commenting on personal events to news, politics, technology. Blogs and blogging gained a boost as a mainstream phenomenon with the popularity of political and news blogs. Even the traditional new media is taking notice of blogs as a news source and are even creating blogs of their own. Now with the availability of both free and paid blogging tools like Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, or Wordpress, it’s easier than ever to start your own blog about any topic you can imagine. With the latest blogging software you don’t need to know HTML or even to have a web site…just grab an account and you’re off to the blogging races!

So how are blogs different from regular old web sites? Other than the journaling format, there are some other differences. Blog software not only makes it easy to make regular entries, but it also makes it easier for blogs to link to other blogs and it’s easy for regular visitors to start conversations on blogs, and therein lays the power of blogging. Instead of one lone blogger tapping away at a solitary blog, bloggers link to other bloggers through a system of tools called permalinks, trackbacks, and blogrolls. If one blogger sees an entry on another blog that he or she finds interesting, they can link to that entry on their own blog through a permalink or trackback, creating a network of interlinked blogs. Visitors to a blog can make comments about a particular entry and even sustain conversations through these comments.

And blogging is not just confined to words…there are also different flavors of blogs including:

• Photolog- blogging with photos
• Vlog- blogging with videos
• Moblog- blogging using a mobile device like a cell phone

More interested in reading blogs than creating one of your own? Well, you’re certainly welcome to keep reading this one! But if you’re still hungry for more, blog directories like Technorati, Feedster, and Blogdigger will find one for every interest imaginable. With over 57 million blogs (and counting) to choose from…how can they not?

Most of us who blog probably start out in similar ways. Perhaps we get a free blog at Blogger or LiveJournal and after a while we’ll decide to move on to something more customizable like Moveable Type or Wordpress. While it’s easy to start off with the out of the box features…you may eventually get the bug and want to start adding some of the nifty features that you see in the other blogs…or perhaps have a snazzy custom layout. But whenever you decide to dig deeper and supercharge your blog…here are a couple of tips (some of them learned the hard way during the redesign of this blog) that may help you out.

Know what you’re trying to accomplish- Take some time to plan out your upgrade before you begin. Have an idea of what theme you want to use, what new features you want to install before digging into the upgrade. One thing that delayed me a little bit was that I kept finding so many cool plugins and I want to try them all while I was in the middle of the redesign. I started making more progress once I narrowed down the features I wanted my blog to have.

Have a realistic timeframe- When I decided to do the upgrade I was hoping to get my whole thing done over a weekend. Well…we can all hope, can’t we? If you’re planning to tie the redesign of your blog to a specific event that has a deadline, perhaps your one or two year anniversary is coming up and you want to celebrate it with a new look, or you’re planning a big promotion that’s going to send people to your blog…be sure to give yourself plenty of time to get it done. Despite our best intentions, things happen, we screw something up during the upgrade and have to fix it…real life intrudes and we have to take care of something personal or business related…or sometimes we just vastly underestimate the time it will take to get the job done. Whatever you estimate it will take for your upgrade, double, maybe even triple that estimate. If you overestimate the time, the worst that can happen is that you finish early.

Back that thing up- Before you even touch anything on your blog, back it up. Back up your database, your themes, any plugins that you may have installed…everthing. The last thing you want is to make one wrong move or install a bad piece of software and lose months or even years worth of posts.

Work on a copy of your blog- When I was doing my upgrade, not only did I make back ups but I created a duplicate of my blog including the database and the theme on my server and made my upgrades on that copy. This was useful in several ways. One, you can make your changes without worrying that you’re going to blow up your current blog. If you’re using a copy of your actual database, you can see what your blog will look let in it’s new theme with real posts. One thing I found when I was doing this was that some of the pictures I have in some of my past blog posts were too big for my new theme. I made sure to resize those pictures before I launched my new blog.

Keep backing that thing up- If you are installing more than one plugin for your site, be sure to back up your database before installing each one. A lot of plugins makes changes to your database and if that particular plugin destroys something on your blog, you’ll have a fresh copy to go back to. The same thing is true if you’re customizing a pre-made theme. Before you start making changes, be sure to have a fresh copy on hand just in case you ruin the theme beyond all recognition.

After you launch your new blog keep a copy of your old blog for awhile- This is useful just in case there are some things that you had in your old blog that you forgot to activate in your new blog. Once I launched my new blog I found that my Feedburner feed was still pointing to my old blog after I did some poking around the old copy. I probably wouldn’t have caught that mistake if I had overwritten the old blog.

Launch your upgrade during off peak hours- My blog statistics showed me that the majority of my readers are from the U.S., so I switched the out the old blog for the new one at about 1:30 in the morning. That way if I messed up the switch it wouldn’t effect my readers too much. If you don’t want to do your switch in the middle of the night, prepare a page that says that you’re upgrading your blog and you should be back up shortly. Make this your index page so that will be the page that people will land on when they arrive at your blog. Once you’ve made the switch and tested out your new blog, remove the page and open up your new masterpiece!

If you can, monitor your 404 hits after you’re done- There’s a great plugin for Wordpress called 404 Notifier that notifies you every time someone hits your 404 page…otherwise known as the Oops! page because it’s the one that people get when they arrive at a page that’s no longer there. Although you should test your blog to make sure that all of your posts are still there, this plugin is good for catching those you miss.

If you have a tip I may have missed, leave a comment!

Every day I’ll pick a Internet-related term and try to explain it in plain English. If you know of a term to you would like me translate from geek to English, let me know
Today’s term is a part of a series that focuses on Web 2.0 related terms

If you’ve ever been to Hawaii, you might have actually seen this word before since in the Hawaiian language, “wiki wiki” actually means “fast”. But in the Internet world, it describes a piece of software that allows you and anyone else to change a web page…fast!

Wiki’s are web sites that allow anyone that visits to add, change, or delete content. For example, if this web site was a wiki, you can come and change this post into almost anything you like…you could change the topic, add links to other sites, add photos, videos…anything. And then someone else could come along and add something else to this post or make changes to your changes. And then someone else could come and delete the post entirely! Talk about power! Can you get anymore Web 2.0 than that?

Nice, you might be saying, but what’s a wiki good for if everyone can change it? It’ll be chaos! Well, not necessarily. Wikis are good for storing knowledge that might be evolving and changing and for allowing a group of knowledgeable people to make updates quickly. And wiki software does allow you to set different levels of permissions. So you can block off certain pages from being changed, block off certain people from changing things, and be notified when there are changes made.

The first known web site that was set up as a wiki was WikiWikiWeb set up by programmer Ward Cunningham. This site focused on programming and Ward Cunningham wanted to make this web site easy for the people that used it make quick edits. But the most well known wiki is of course the famous Wikipedia…the online encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to…which is actually where I found the biography of Ward Cunningham…the guy who helped make Wikipedia possible.

?Update The word “wiki” is landed a spot in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Every day I’ll pick a Internet-related term and try to explain it in plain English. If you know of a term to you would like me translate from geek to English, let me know

Today’s term is a part of a series that focuses on Web 2.0 related terms

The term “social media” describes how people use the Internet and different Internet technologies in order to share their content, opinions, and experiences with others on the Internet.

Now, using the web in order to connect with other people isn’t new. We’ve been using email, chat, and forums for years. What makes social media interesting is that the technology on the web now allows people to contribute their own content on the web…it allows people to share not only their own content, but the content of others with their friends and family…and they can also share their opinions and thoughts about that content. And instead of connecting with others just to talk to one another, people are connecting with in order to control and shape the Internet.

What kind of content are talking about? Pretty much anything and everything. You can upload and share your photos of Hawaii on Flickr and Zoto, and critique and share the photos of other shutterbugs. You can submit that video of you lip syncing to at Britney Spears song (minus hair cut) YouTube or Dailymotion and laugh at and email the videos contributed by other wannabe pop stars to your friends. You can use del.icio.us and StumbleUpon to store the links to your favorite sites and poke through the bookmarks of other people to find new sites. If your a Mister or Mrs. Smartypants, you would enjoy Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia where you can add your own “encyclopedia” entries and correct factual errors on others. And we mustn’t forget the infamous MySpace…a place where you can create your own “space” to gather friends and to create a network of people like you.

In a nutshell, social media is all about sharing…photos, videos, links, knowledge, opinions, news, games…anything you can think of.

Before…

After…

After about a week and half of work and testing, I’ve finally completed the redesign of The Crafted Webmaster. Along with a brand new theme, and new layout, I’ve also added some nifty new plug-ins that will make it easier for visitors to look around on the blog.

So any comments? Complaints? Suggestions? Leave a comment!