Web Hosting of a Blog

Blog Hosting

A blog takes up disk space and must be served from a web server. If you already own (or pay for space on) a web server, you probably want to host your blog there. For example, Neil Gaiman's web site contains a biography, a bibliography, FAQs, a message board, and much more, so it's the logical place to keep his blog. Some tools (for example, Greymatter, Movable Type, Blosxom, Slash, Zope, and Manila) can be installed on your server. Others (for example, Blogger and Radio UserLand) can publish your blog to your site by uploading files via FTP. FTPing your blog files can become very time consuming, though, for blogs with many entries.

Installing software on your web server requires some know-how (logging into Unix or adding software to a Windows or Macintosh server, where are the CGI programs kept, and so on) that may eliminate some choices for the less tech-savvy.If you don't already have web hosting, or you're just getting started online, or even if you're an old hand but simply don't want to pay for the bandwidth used by your blog, you can choose to host it on someone else's server. Radio UserLand, Blogger, and LiveJournal come with free hosting.

There are caveats to blog hosting services, though. Blogger's free service, BlogSpot, puts banner advertisements on your blog (they do offer an ad-free service for $13/year). The LiveJournal service doesn't let you host your blog on anywhere but LiveJournal's web site. In all cases, when you use someone else's hosting service, you're at the mercy of their quality of service — both Blogger and UserLand have had occasional outages. And although it hasn't happened yet, if your blog hosting service goes broke, your blog could be a victim.

PriceLiveJournal, Blosxom, and Blogger are completely free. Blogger has an upgrade path, however: for advanced features such as RSS and Weblogs.com notification, you have to pay for Blogger Pro (now $35 per year, will be $50 per year, once all the planned features are available). LiveJournal sells a subscription ($5 for 2 months, $15 for 6 months, $25 for 12 months) that provides you with benefits such as a livejournal.com email address, text messaging, advanced customization, and faster servers.

Radio UserLand has a free 30-day trial and costs $39.95 per year. This gets you free software updates and blog hosting. You can continue to use the software after your subscription expires, but you won't receive updates and you must make separate arrangements to host your blog.Greymatter is completely free. The author accepts donations through PayPal, however. This may seem odd at first, but it enables those who can afford to pay for their software to name their own price. If you can't afford to pay, you can still use the software and not be a criminal.Movable Type is free for personal and non-profit use. Commercial users need a $150 commercial license. Personal and non-profit users can donate in a PBS-like model — $20 gets you a key to be listed on "Recently Updated Movable Type Blogs" and $45 gets you all that and support for instant messaging within certain hours.

Manila is part of the $899 commercial product called Frontier. Manila is the blog hosting and management part of the larger Frontier content-management system. You can get a free 60-day trial of Manila from http://manila.userland.com/. Slash and Zope are both open source software. You can download, install, and use them without paying. Slash is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), while Zope is released under the Zope Public License (ZPL).

Useful Bloggin Tools

While it's possible to generate and maintain a blog by writing and updating each page by hand, you'd have to be a masochist to do so. The remainder of this book is devoted to several tools that automate the administrivia of blogging: Blogger, Radio UserLand, Movable Type, and Blosxom.This isn't the full spectrum of blogging tools — products such as Greymatter, Manila, LiveJournal, and others all have strong user bases.

The tools we've chosen to cover in-depth, though, represent various niches in the blogging spectrum — some are for gurus, some are for novices; some require you to install software on your PC, some can be run completely from afar; some work with your own domain, others host your blog for you; and so on.This section discusses the features of several blog management systems, not just the ones we describe in detail in the book. Table 1-1 lists the systems covered in this section and their URLs.After reading this section, you can make an informed decision about which tool is right for you.

Blogger http://www.blogger.com/
Blogger Pro http://pro.blogger.com/
Blosxom http://www.raelity.org/lang/perl/blosxom/
Greymatter http://www.noahgrey.com/greysoft/
LiveJournal http://www.livejournal.com/
Manila http://manila.userland.com/
Movable Type http://www.movabletype.org/
Radio UserLand http://radio.userland.com/
Slash http://www.slashcode.org/
Zope http://www.zope.org/

Explaining Syndication of a Blog

Rich Site Summary (RSS) is a data format that allows computers to exchange files containing summaries of stories. Each story typically has a title, location, and possibly a brief synopsis. RSS is extremely simple, and is expressed using standards-defined Extensible Markup Language (XML). Thousands of blogs and other web sites all over the Net produce RSS files describing their content.The cool thing about RSS is that it's easy to write a program to produce or manipulate the data in an RSS document. RSS is so simple to generate and manipulate that hundreds of programmers have written tools to exploit the thousands of RSS feeds on the Internet.

For example, the Mac OS X toolbar application called MacReporter (http://inferiis.com/products/macreporter/) can regularly fetch headlines from news sites and blogs. You can then scan the headlines looking for interesting news to blog or simply read. Meerkat (http://meerkat.oreillynet.com) is an excellent web-based RSS reader that allows you to filter the feeds you receive by keyword, time, and origin.Some bloggers have coded custom RSS tools that integrate tightly with their blogs, so that filtered headlines from other sites appear in sidebars on their front pages.

Dave Winer's Weblogs.com is a list of blogs that have sent an "updated" notice over the Internet to the service. If you're looking for a list of recently updated weblogs, you can visit http://www.weblogs.com and browse the list; but if you're a programmer, you can fetch the Weblogs.com RSS feed and get an easy-to-manipulate list of recently updated sites to feed to a search engine or RSS reader.RSS is a powerful way of spreading your blog entries far and wide.Publishing a FeedSome blogging tools, such as Radio and Movable Type, publish RSS feeds by default. Others have options to enable feeds. If your blogging tool doesn't generate its own feed, you can still publish blogs by using Julian Bond's RSSify tool at http://www.voidstar.com/rssify.php.Most blogs that offer RSS feeds have links to those feeds on their sites. A new technique that's gaining popularity is to embed in your web page a pointer to the RSS for that page. This makes it much easier to write tools that automatically discover RSS feeds.

RSS Aggregators

An RSS aggregator is a tool that regularly fetches RSS feeds and stores their contents in a database. A personal aggregator (such as Plucky, available at http://geoffreygrosenbach.com/plucky.html, or AmphetaDesk, available at http://www.amphetadesk.com) is used as a kind of software agent, a tool that searches any RSS feed you specify for stories, filters them according to your preferences, and displays the results.Some blogging tools, such as Radio UserLand, include aggregators. You can fetch and filter RSS feeds from all over the Internet, from blogs to major news-organs such as the New York Times, which has a special arrangement with UserLand Spftware to provide Radio UserLand users with exclusive news-feeds. Radio UserLand's aggregator makes it trivial to turn stories that you discover via RSS into blog entries, by ticking a box and adding some commentary.Internet aggregators such as Meerkat fetch thousands of feeds and make them available to people and to software agents.

What is Google Adsense?

Google Adsense and Blogger
In short, Google Adsense is a program that rewards site owners and bloggers when they serve Google Adsense ads on their sites. At Blogger, you can set your Google Adsense ads to surround your blog posts. You make money when someone click on the ads. Of course, that person cannot be you, and the click must not be an artificial click. If you attempt to click on your own ads, or any action that will artificially inflate the advertisers costs, Google is smart enough to track that and ban your Adsense account. So be careful not to violate Adsense's TOS.

Google Loves Blogs
Advertisers love blogs as well. This is because blogs are frequently updated and usually contain truthful and up-to-date information. Essentially, Google loves blogs, advertisers love blogs, bloggers love Google and advertisers. Everyone is happy!

To Make Money Blogging
To make money blogging with Blogger, you need to have an account with Google Adsense program. Of course, other than Google Adsense, you can still make money from our Dollar Auction. However, if you have Google Adsense, you will make more money. After signing up with Google Adsense, you will have to insert your Google Adsense Publisher ID into "my account" page. Then, your ads will start to show all around your blogs.

What Earns You?
When someone click on one of the ads serving around your blog posts, Google will pay you part of the advertising fee. How much is that part, Google chooses not to declare. Revenue per click depends on how much the advertiser pays to get the ad shown.