I have been asked to gently introduce the FWA New Tampa / Wesley Chapel (NTWC) writers group to using and creating blogs at the June 4th meeting. Of course that meant blogging the content I was going to present. This is an article series on Blogging for Writers.
Introduction
In the last article in this series, I answered the question of what is a blog. In this article, I will discuss reading a blog. Given that you are reading this blog, you should already know this, and I wont spend a lot of time on this subject.
Reading Blogs
Knowing what a blog is no fun if you don’t actually read one. So I would suggest doing so. The only tool you need to read a blog is your web browser. Assuming you know the web address of a blog, for this example we will use the http://fwapontevedra.blogspot.com/ into your browsers address bar.
Here is what it looks like in Internet Explorer 9:
And here is Google Chrome:
And finally Firefox:
Once the page is loaded, read away. This blog is for the Florida Writers Association Ponte Verda writers group. You have just read your first blog. Now you want to go and do other things, like work on that chapter of your novel you have been ignoring, but you want to save this blog to read future posts. The typical web behavior is to bookmark the site and every few days load that bookmark and see if there was anything new posted. While this may work for one or two blogs, when you are following dozens or hundreds of blogs, it is unmanageable. The solution is to treat blogs like any other periodical, subscribe to it, and it will be delivered to you.