Chapter 13: Site Development with Weblogs
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Figure 13-8: Adding a new entry in Movable Type.
That’s about as complex as it gets. You can see in Figure 13-8 that I’ve already added a title and typed in a few paragraphs of text. When I’m ready, I just click on Publish (scrolled off the page in Figure 13-8), and I’ve added a new entry to my weblog, I’ve created a new archive page with the article contents, and made adding the new content to my site the work of a few minutes, not an hour or two. Are weblogs for everyone? Probably not. Are they for you? Maybe. Spend some time exploring the many different weblogs on the net and see what you think. Then talk with some bloggers about what tools they use and how they like them. Finally, talk with your ISP to see if it has anything already installed, and then don’t be afraid to take the plunge. It’s fun!
The World of RSS As I commented earlier, if you’ve been on the Web in the last year or two, it seems inevitable that you’ve stumbled across—or perhaps started your own—weblog. Although these online diaries and content management systems are cool and compelling, most of the weblog tools produce an incidental data stream that turns out to be the most valuable of all: RSS. Known as really simple syndication, RSS is a copy of the content of the weblog in a machine-parseable format based on XML, the eXtensible Markup Language.