First of all, a blog is a Web site. Don’t let anybody tell you that Web sites and Weblogs are different creatures. To be clear, though, a Weblog is a type of Web site. It follows, then, that all Weblogs are Web sites, but not all Web sites are Weblogs.
Note that a blog is a Web site, not an entry on that Web site. Some new bloggers say, “I wrote five blogs today.” Actually they wrote five entries in their blog.
So, what distinguishes a Weblog from other sites?
Weblogs have a certain type of software running in the background. This answer might seem obscure, but that software is the hidden key to blogs. In fact, blog software is so useful that it has spawned the blogging revolution with its millions of new sites. So what is this powerhouse that lies behind blogs, and how does it make blogs different from other sites?
Here is the crucial power of blogs: They make it easy to frequently add content to a Web site. Blog programs and ready-to-use blogging services cut out the laborious and technical traditional process of building a Web site and adding pages to it. Consider what a site owner needed to do before blogs were available:
1. To create a single Web page, a site owner had to gain some familiarity with HTML (hypertext markup language, the underlying code of all Web sites). The choice was to write out the code by hand (fairly difficult) or use software that made page-creation a little more intuitive. Design skills
were needed and the software could be expensive. Ready-made templates eased the pain somewhat, but building a single page the old way was never as easy as blogging.
2. After creating a single-page, old-style site, the owner had to get it up on the Web. Usually, this meant using an internet system called FTP (file transfer protocol), which is somewhat like the My Computer program in Windows but operates across the space between two computers. Using FTP, the owner could upload newly created or altered pages to his or her site, which resided on an Internet computer. After the transfer, the new page became “live” and could be viewed by visitors to the site.
