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The typical blog consists of 6 parts, or elements:

Posts: A blog post in written by the blog author. In some cases, a blog will have multiple authors or contributors. A post will typically consist of text and images, but can also include embedded video and links to other posts or pages. Depending on how the blog is set up, it can show either the full post, or an excerpt of the post which tends to consist of a few sentences designed to capture the reader’s attention and get them to click for the full post.

Comments: A comment is written by the reader is response to your blog post. In many cases, it will be a reader who is thanking you for what should be great information. In other cases, the reader will be asking for additional information. This provides you with an excellent opportunity to open a line of communication with your audience. Take advantage of this opportunity to build a rapport with your readers!

Sidebar: A sidebar on your blog tends to consist of a number of features, normally widgets which increase the functionality of your blog. Widgets can include functions to pull your Twitter timeline or other things directly into your blog, but is not limited to this. There are thousands of widgets available for free online. Find ones which complement your blog!

Categories: A categories list on your blog allows readers quick access to different information on your blog. Categorizing your posts also gives you SEO benefits by allowing you to separate your information into easily spiderable themes/topics. When you create something user-friendly, it is normally search friendly as well.

Archives: An archive section on your blog gives people easy access to your past posts, normally on a month by month basis. Including an Archive section on your blog is always a good idea, simply because your readers will not have to spend a great deal of time searching for your posts. If they recall a particular post you had written in January for example, they can simply click on the January Archive and find it.

Recent Posts: This is made up of a list of recent posts, normally for the month, on your blog. It will allow your readers the quickly choose from a list of your post titles, drawing them in deeper. Due to this element, you will want to make sure your blog posts of attractive titles.

Now, as stated at the beginning, the typical blog is made up of these 6 elements. By no means should you feel obligated too make use of only these 6 elements. You can pick and choose what elements to include. Make sure you explore your blog platform to discover what other elements they might offer which could be leveraged to provide an enhanced user experience on your blog.

Try including multimedia elements, such as video, if you have some. Blogging is all about capturing your audience, so build a captivating blog and give people a reason to keep on coming back for more!

The actual process of blogging is simple, right? Sit down in front of your computer with a cup of coffee and start typing, right? Wrong.

This is actually the very last step in the process of blogging. First, you need to know your audience. What type of people do you want reading your blog? What type of blog is it? Is it a personal blog where you are simply blogging about your day, your thoughts and feelings? Or, is it an industry related blog, where you will be blogging about new developments in your field of expertise?

These are very important things you need to take into account. So, let’s break down what you need to know before you actually start blogging!

1. What type of blog are you creating? (Personal, Industry, News Aggregation, Political, etc.)
2. What is your target demographic? (Teens, adults, industry professionals,  bloggers, etc.)
3. How often are you going to blog? (Daily, Weekly, Bi-weekly, monthly, etc.)
4. What blog platform are you going to use? (WordPress, Blogger.com, TypePad, etc.)
   • It is important to consider a few things here. Are you planning to host the blog on your own server/URL and does it support certain blog software, or are you going to host it for free through blogger.com or wordpress.com, for example.
   • Each option has positives and negatives. Free hosting, you don’t have as much control over your blog. You can’t completely customize your blog. When you pay for hosting, it’s all yours. You can modify your blog to your heart’s content. Custom templates, widgets, plugins… you name it!
   • Do your homework. Always make sure the information you are putting out is accurate. If you are writing a personal blog, you need not worry. However, if you are writing an industry blog, you need to ensure you information is factual and has value for your readers.
   • Do it from the heart. If you don’t enjoy doing it, it’s going to show in what you do. To quote Dale Carnegie, “People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.”

And please keep in mind, if you can’t find the time to write a blog post every few days consisting of about 200-300 words, you are working too hard. Take a breather. In the words of Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

In other words, do what you love, and love what you do. If you don’t like blogging, then don’t torture yourself into creating new posts every day, every week, or even every month! Myself, I enjoy blogging. This post actually has 465 words right now, and I have only been writing for a few minutes. The trick is, don’t stress about what you are writing.

Just let it flow.

In today’s society, it is difficult to imagine a time before the blog. It has even gotten to the point where we are addicted to micro-blogging, which comes to us in the form of the “tweet”, made possible by Twitter. But where did it all start? Well, for that we need to take a trip way back the early 80’s.

The concept of blogging has been around since 1983, but technology didn’t quite catch up until the rise of HTTP in the early 1990’s. Before the modern web, there was Usenet, which was the original internet. Usenet had a number of moderated newsgroups which allowed people the opportunity to share their thoughts with a group of people under the moderation of a certain individual or a small group of people. For the most part, they were simply discussion groups.

Not everyone had access to this medium in order to express themselves, however. We must bear in mind that this was the early days of what would one day become the internet.

In 1983-1984, this began to evolve, thanks to a man by the name of Brian E. Redman and some of his friends. They began to make summary postings on Usenet about other interesting postings being made in different “threads” on other discussion boards. The original news aggregators.

Let’s take a step forward into the 1990’s and what was then the “modern” blog.

In the early 90’s blogging, or “weblogs” as it is actually known, began to evolve into an online diary format. These early blogs were basically difficult to update web pages where people would write about their day, their thoughts or their feelings. These writings were thrust out onto the web, often with very few people ever even seeing them. At this time, due to the limitations of design and connection speed, these blogs were often bare-bones in styling.

Jump forward again to the late 90’s.

Now, we are beginning to see blog platforms being introduced to the online-world. In 1998, Open Diary launched. This was the innovator of the “reader comment”, giving your follower the chance to comment on posts and actually open a line of communication with a web author, or “blogger”.

One year later, in March of 1999, Brad Fitzpatrick, who is also a well-known blogger, created LiveJournal, an online journal which is open to the public, and still around to this day.

In this same year, Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan of Pyra Labs launched Blogger.Com, which was purchased by Google in 2003. Blogger.com enjoyed massive success as one of the most advanced blog platforms the world had ever seen. This platform started a new revolution in blogging, making it easier to combine personal pages with valuable tools such as permalinks, blogrolls and trackbacks.

When this was combined with weblog search engines, it opened a whole new door for blog enthusiasts to find new blog authors and connect with bloggers who shared similar interests.

In May of 2003, the blog game changed once again with the launch of WordPress. Sources say that WordPress blogs comprise 2% of the 10,000 biggest websites online today. Created by Matt Mullenwag, as of September 2009 WordPress was being used by more than 202 million websites globally.

This open source blog publishing application revolutionized blogging, allowing for a simple, yet sophisticated templating system that made for seamless integration into a websites which supported PHP and MySQL. The user-friendly workflow and stunning plugin architecture employed by WordPress attracted many new users and, as far as this author is concerned, started the era of the modern blogger.

So, into the blogosphere, you ask? What is the blogosphere, exactly?

The term “blogosphere” was originally coined back in 1999 by Brad L. Graham as a joke. In 2002, it was re-coined by William Quick and quickly propagated across the internet. This term originally stemmed from the term “logosphere”, from the Greek “logos”, meaning “word”, and “sphere”, meaning “world”. So, in other words, the world of words.

Welcome to the Blogoshpere

I am going to use this post to discuss all five of the modules included within the title; FAQs, Photo Galleries, Site Search, Comments, and Site Map. My usual post contains information on just one module, but all of these are pretty simplistic, and take little to no effort to setup, and use properly. In fact most of them are pretty self-explanatory once you have gone into the back-end and selected to use it.

The FAQ module is for displaying lists of Frequently Asked Questions. Anyone can build a plain HTML listing of FAQs and set anchor links from the questions up top to the answers below, but that can be a little more time consuming, and not everyone has to know-how to get this done. This particular module takes that extra bit of work out of the equation. All you need to do to create a question/answer is go into the FAQ module, and select create new FAQ. You will need to simply fill out the question, and then provide the answer. You can then add just that FAQ to a page, add all of the FAQs, or just the FAQs within a certain classification category. The FAQ page will display with a list of a question at the top, which anchor link down to the answers.

The Photo Galleries are one of the easiest modules within the eFusion system to use. To create a gallery you should first create a separate folder within the file manager to hold all of your images. Once you have done that, upload all of the images to the folder. You should try to re-size the images prior to upload to save on load times, and disk space. A decent standard to follow of photo sizes would be 600×400 pixels, or 400×600 pixels. Once this has been completed you can go into your photo gallery module, and create a new gallery. It will ask you to title the gallery, and select the folder it should pull the images from. You will also then have the option of adding a descriptive tag to each of the images within that folder. You can then add the Photo Gallery onto any web page you wish. The images will be automatically re-sized down to 80×80 pixels.

The default sizing can, however, be changed if you wish. A default tag for the photo gallery will look like this: {module_photogallery,id}. However there are multiple attributes you can add into the tag itself. This tage will show the various attributes: {module_photogallery,id,rowLength,targetFrame,resultsPerPage,Width,Height,UseStandardMethod}. So if you wish to up-size the thumbnails of the gallery you will end up with a tag like this: {module_photogallery,id,4,,12,120,120). The large image will be shown in a light-box when someone has selected the thumbnail image.

The site search is a very basic module. All that is required to be done in order to utilize this module is go into the module, create a new search, tell it what on the site you want it to pick-up, and then add it onto a page, or template.

The comments module is more of a module add-on than a module of its own. By default a comments form is attached to many of eFusion’s modules, such as the Blog, FAQs, Announcements ect. If you are allowing comments for any of these items you can set them to appear automatically, or you can set them to need administrator before they can be displayed.

The Site Map is another pretty self-explanatory module. Clicking into the site map module will provide you with a list of all of your current web pages. You just need to drag and drop all of the pages into their appropriate hierarchy, and then add the site map onto the proper web page. It will display as a multi-leveled unordered list that you can format through CSS.

Today I am going to explain the functions of the Bookings Module, and the best way to go about using this. As the title of the module states, this can be used to create bookings for various events and functions. You have the ability to set a specific capacity for each event, and have the booking become hidden once it has become full. The booking module starts off with a default form that will be attached to any Booking that you create. This can be modified going forwards to suit your personalized needs, or if you need different form information for separate bookings you can create an individual form to attach to just one or more bookings.

The original booking form can be found within the webforms section of the website, can be modified there just like any other form you have added to your site. Like-wise if you are planning on using different sign-up forms for different bookings you can create the form here.

Now, if you are indeed using a different webform for your different bookings there is a bit of further customization that needs to be done to the layout. You will need to go into the booking module’s advanced layout section, and select the “Detail View”. Here is where you will find the default form already integrated. You can simply delete this form from the layout. Now you can place the form you have created into the details section of your booking.

When you are adding bookings to a webpage you will be provided with 2 different options in terms of displaying the list of your bookings. You will have the option to enter in all, one, or a set category of bookings on a webpage. This will display all the bookings in a list format with their title, and descriptions, as well as any other fields you choose to add in the “List View” of the advanced layout. The bookings will display in descending order according to the date the events will be hosted on.
The second option for display is to insert all of the booking, or just a specific category of bookings in a calendar view. This will give you a pre-formatted calendar that will show only the title of the booking on the date is set to be hosted on. The colors of the calendar and text can be formatted through CSS to suit your unique style.

There is one main drawback to using this module, and that is its inability to setup a re-occurring event. Any event that will be hosted on a monthly basis will have to be setup every single month.