RSS Feed

October 28th, 2009

RSS (most commonly translated as “Really Simple Syndication” but sometimes “Rich Site Summary”) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a “feed”, “web feed”,or “channel”) includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an “RSS reader”, “feed reader”, or “aggregator”, which can be web-based, desktop-based, or mobile-device-based. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs. The user subscribes to a feed by entering into the reader the feed’s URI or by clicking an RSS icon in a web browser that initiates the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds.

Internet History

October 28th, 2009

Joomla Vs WordPress

October 15th, 2009

Joomla’s strenght is in complexity. Deep level navigation, sections in sections, categories etc… It has fixed pages and posts, posts Great for community sites, you can create a regular site with it but I would regard that as overkill.

WordPress is basically a very user friendly blog system but it can be used as a regular site which you can update without any knowledge of html (the same goes for Joomla). You can create pages and posts, and with plugins, you can add a lot of functionality included standard in Joomla, except that all code is web standard. And because WordPress is web standard, Google really loves it. So, from a marketing standpoint, WordPress is hard to resist.

The interface is easy to understand, you won’t need a book for it, although buying a “WordPress for Dummies” – book will save you some time if you have no experience with blog management at all. Adapting the look requires some knowledge of CSS, the style sheet language. Like with Joomla, if you select a template close to what you want, adapting the colors, logo etc.. is not that complicated but if you do not want to get involved with CSS, and you would like to re-arrange navigation elements as well, you might consider hiring a web developer. Since WordPress has a logical structure, it is easy for a developer to change things around, place ad banners etc…Again, give preference to a specialized developer used to work with WordPress.

It is setup very quickly and you can be listed in Google within 2 days. I haven’t seen any other system doing that so far. A normal site takes up to 2 months to get listed in Google, so this is something to take into account. Anybody can learn enough in 2 hours to create content with WordPress right away, including using categories and sub pages.

WordPress can handle tons of visitors. It will not break down easily.

Disadvantages of WordPress:
For instance, adding or removing post dates, need to be changed in design mode and it requires knowledge of WP scripting. The navigational structure is determined by the layout template you chose. Changing that structure again requires knowledge of the WP scripting language and CSS. With Joomla, you do not run into this problem because menus are controlled via the control panel and attributes like dates, author name etc, can be turned on and off per article or for the whole site in one go. In that sense, Joomla is much more a content management system.

Also, changing the order of categories or pages is rather cumbersome in Wordpress. It involves having to go into all of the categories and change the order by hand. The WP developers are working on it to fix it, but when is unpredictable.

In short:
WordPress is simple, you can see it as a blog or as a regular website. It has fixed pages, posts and categories. Through the use of plugins you can extend its functionality and let it grow as big and complicated as you want. However, not every plugin is easy to understand, so it might be a good idea to have a specialized web developer in case of emergencies.

Blog Vs Article

October 2nd, 2009

The first question to address is, what are the differences between the two. Many different people will offer many different answers to this question, but the best description I’ve been able to put together is as follow:

A blog organizes information by time whereas an article based website organizes information by content into information structures (example: categories)

What this means is that although we perceive blogs and article sites to be quite different, the content contained therein in relatively interchangeable. I say relatively because blogs are often much less formal than a comparative article based website. The informal nature of blogs is simply a socially influenced norm.

Blogs were great for informal writing when they began because none of the information needed to be organized logically. All of the content organization was handled based on the date of creation. Once people saw examples of informal, personal blogs, they caught on like wildfire and have resulted in what we recognize as blogs today. But if you look at some of the more “professional” blogs, you’ll find content that’s written in such a manner that it could easily be presented as an article and be part of an article based website.

Similarly, on the other side of the coin, there are websites that appear to be article based, but could easily be converted to a blog format. Any article based website that has ongoing content development and/or articles released on a regular schedule can take on the blog format and still make a lot of sense.

Raz Systems Add

September 30th, 2009

raz systems add